Yelp, Airbnb, Twitter, and other apps are secretly rating you as a consumer. Here's how to check your score.

Yutong Yuan/Business Insider

• Businesses give everyone - including you - a secret rating based on how much you've spent, your consumer preferences, and other personal information apps and websites have collected.
• These scores can be used to rank how valuable you are as a customer or predict your shopping activity.
• Thanks to a new privacy law, the companies that collect these ratings are now legally required to turn over your "file" upon request.
• Here's how to request your "file" from five companies identified by The New York Times that compile consumer scores.
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The messages you sent to your Airbnb host, meals you ordered via Yelp, and posts you liked on Twitter are all being tracked and secretly stored in your personal 'file,' which those companies can use to determine how valuable you are as a customer.

People's secret files are typically aggregated from their activity on these apps and stored by third parties, five of which were identified in a recent report by The New York Times' Kashmir Hill.

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Thanks to a newly passed California law, companies will have to start providing users in the US with a copy of their file upon request. A similar law is already in place in the European Union.

The third-party companies that aggregate people's consumer files say the primary purpose is to detect suspicious behavior and identify possible hackers. However, a June report from the Consumer Education Foundation calls for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate how secret consumer scores are used.

"Major American corporations, including online and retail businesses, employers and landlords are using Secret Surveillance Scores to charge some people higher prices for the same product than others, to provide some people with better customer services than others, to deny some consumers the right to purchase services or buy or return products," the report warns.

Here's a rundown of five companies that compile secret files on people and how to request your file.