You’re at a job interview and your prospective boss pulls out their phone to check your Employee Obedience score: 4.5. OK. When you get the job, your new colleagues use an app to see how previous colleagues have reviewed you. Your Overall Likability score is 3.2. They learn that you play Rihanna on repeat and hoard pens. Nevertheless, a girl in sales thinks you’re kind of hot, so uses an app to look up your Relationship score: 3.4. She reads reviews from former partners that cover everything from your table manners to your bedroom manners. It seems you always serve yourself first.

Welcome to the future in which every aspect of our personalities and behaviour is assigned a star rating, available for all to see. Think this sounds crazy? Your Suspension of Disbelief score is probably low. Bear with me. You can rate my Credibility Quotient at the end.

Rating systems are integral to the new digital world. The so-called sharing economy requires trust to function, and that trust is based on user ratings; they’re the confidence-lubricant that keep the likes of Airbnb, Uber and eBay running. User ratings also have a massive impact on our purchasing decisions – a study of Seattle restaurants found that a one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue.

Today, everyone is a critic. You might not be posting 2,000-word rants on TripAdvisor, but you’re probably taking part in more regular, subtler rating behaviour you barely even notice. From rating your Uber driver and the programme you just watched on Netflix, to your experience with a customer service rep, rating has become part of our daily lives.

Ratings might not seem like a big deal; they’re nothing more than a helpful way to figure out where to go for brunch, right? However, there is an insidious side to those stars. Rating culture is forging new power structures and behaviours that are paving the way to a future you might not like.

First, there’s the fact that rating systems can severely skew social power dynamics. That Employment Obedience score, for example? It basically exists in the form of Uber driver ratings. Uber passengers are essentially unpaid supervisors of the company, monitoring drivers’ behaviour so Uber can manage its workforce. Indeed a judge, in a case assessing the employment status of Uber drivers, has even compared Uber’s rating system to the panopticon in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. “A state of conscious and permanent visibility ... assures the automatic functioning of power,” the judge quoted. The power that riders have is actually quite considerable. If an Uber driver’s score dips below a 4.6 rating they can get barred from working with the service. Rating your driver a 4, then, is essentially failing them. And yet many people might consider a 4/5 to be “very good”. Surely this is something that Uber should make clear to the riders it uses as monitors?

Of course, the flipside to this, and the side that you most often hear, is that ratings help improve driver behaviour, assuring you a safer ride. That’s certainly true – although, as an aside, it’s worth noting that the Uber driver who went on a random shooting spree that killed six people in Michigan last month had an Uber rating of 4.73. Then there’s also the fact that the rating system isn’t one-way; customers also get rated. You’re more likely to be a courteous passenger if you know getting a bad score might result in you being cut off from the convenience of Uber in the future. The rider is also in a state of conscious and permanent visibility.

Adding to this is the fact that current rating systems aren’t designed to weed out societal biases and so might reinforce discrimination. While we don’t know for sure whether Uber driver ratings are affected by factors such as gender and race (because we don’t have access to Uber’s full data set), there are plenty of studies that lead one to presume this. A 2005 study of taxi rides in Connecticut, for example, found that African-American cab drivers were tipped approximately one-third less than white cab drivers.

Finally, as rating culture has become more pervasive, we’ve gone beyond simply rating products or services and ventured into more personal territory. There are, for example, platforms that let you rate your coworkers and your bosses. And that Relationship Score I mentioned? There was actually an app for that. It was called Lulu and it let women “read and create reviews about the guys they know based on their romantic, personal and sexual appeal”. For a while, a quarter of university-aged women in America were using it (Lulu has since pivoted into being a simple dating app).

It seems likely that plenty more apps will pop up to rate ever more personal aspects of our lives. Last week, for example, saw the relaunch of Peeple: an app that lets you rate people you know within three different spheres: personal, professional and dating. So you might want to think twice if you do play Rihanna on repeat and hoard the pens. Your frustrated colleagues now have a convenient way to, quite literally, settle the score.