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Hi, Lemmy is giving me the infinite spinning wheel when I try to reply, so I'm gonna try to send it in two. Hope you don't mind that I have a lot to say in response to your comment haha

I think you’re overlooking that they are publicly traded companies.

That has not been overlooked at all. It's because they are publicly traded that they are publicly owned. It would be strange to conclude publicly traded -> privately owned without expanding on it at all. I will elaborate on this.

It’s a bit of a stretch to say that because they’re publicly traded that means things are a-ok with them assigning scores to people.

At no point did I say this was okay. My comment was entirely descriptive and made no prescription for scoring citizens. I actually later said that the corporate structure was vulnerable to these scores, which would imply that I think it's a problem.

In conclusion, these companies need to be regulated since they basically control people’s destinies through a non-democratically controlled system.

To which I would say they already are regulated and this is the result.

I'll explain everything in more detail...

Private Ownership:

• the fact of being owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by the state or a public body. (I googled "define private ownership")
• Private companies are owned by those who establish them and those invited to invest in them. The public-at-large cannot buy shares or otherwise invest in private companies at their own discretion. Public Ownership:
• A public company is a company that has sold a portion of itself to the public via an initial public offering (IPO), meaning shareholders have a claim to part of the company's assets and profits. (Same source)
• ownership by the government of an asset, corporation, or industry. (I googled "define public ownership")

So, private ownership is opposed to both the state and public bodies, implying that a public body isn't necessarily a state (according to google). This complicates things once you get into the nature of corporations and their relationship with the government (I'll expand on this), so a better operating definition is probably the second one, which means: it is private if the general public can't by shares.

Countless definitions refer to public ownership both as government ownership, or publicly traded. Choosing one definition does not contradict the other. Let me repeat : saying public ownership refers to government ownership does not contradict that it also refers to publicly traded ownership. This is why it's wrong to conclude that these corporations are private. They are public traded, and are therefor public. This shouldn't be surprising, it's in the word. That which is public is not private, and that which is private is not public.

People get caught up on the fact that private citizens can own shares. It's often used to conclude that the corporation they hold shares in a therefor privately owned. This is flawed logic, because private units can be a part of a public collective. When referencing a public corporation's ownership, we are not referencing any single individual, but a collective, in the exact same way that "the public" refers to a collective of private citizens of a state. It's also directly contradicted in the definition: "... owned by a private individual or organization." A. Singular.