You may well remember Bruce Willis getting miffed that he didn’t really own his vast iTunes collection and therefore technically couldn’t pass his it on to his kids via his will.

Well, it seems who owns and controls what’s on our devices is becoming more and more of a hot topic.

Recently, the manufacturer of a vacuum cleaner that not only cleaned your floor coverings but also calculated the square footage of your abode and then sold this information to advertisers was forced to apologise for ‘intrusive and highly inappropriate corporate conduct’.

More alarming and intrusive still, a manufacturer of sex toys (of all things) admitted to tracking the intimate details of its users ‘behaviour’ through remote data collection.

You may have read that in light of the proposed punitive import tax on Bombardier aircraft imposed by the US, the British Government warned Boeing that this could jeopardise future orders of their formidable military air craft by our MOD.

Trouble is, Whitehall procurement really love Apache helicopters (made by Boeing) and we’ve recently bought fifty of the buggers – but without the on-going technical support, updates and endless software patches supplied exclusively by Boeing, our Apaches are merely useless (and very pricey) ornaments.

It should be said that such control freakery isn’t all malign or big brother like though. During the recent hurricanes in The Caribbean and Florida, Tesla remotely upgraded the distance range of the batteries in their electric cars so desperate drivers could escape Hurricane Irma.

So you may think you’re being left to your own devices, but who’s really pulling the strings?