IMAGINE viewing the digital log of your daily life. Your day started with the alarm going off on your smart phone. You squinted at the text message from the boss informing you about shifting of the meeting venue. As you were brushing your teeth you flicked the city traffic channel on your digital set top box. As you drove to work, your GPS tracked the route you took. Your debit card has logged the time of your coffee break downstairs.

Among other such mundane items, your day’s digital log also contains your browsing history (even though you took care to delete it from your computer), the Google searches you conducted and all those who called you.

Broadband internet was introduced 14 years ago. Smart phones followed a few years later. Then came 3G and now with 4G, the slope of the technology curve — and rate of innovation — keeps getting steeper. And with that, the rate of diffusion of new devices and applications has become mind-numbing. Each time you log in, download, view a photo, you are leaving a digital fingerprint. What many of us may not realise is how commercially valuable this data is.

Today technology companies are positioning themselves for what will be the grand finale of all marketing battles. Unlike the past when customer numbers and market share were contested, the coming battle is about whose operating system emerges dominant ie whose rules everyone else will play by. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook are the frontrunners in a race. The ‘also ran’ list includes IBM, Hewlett Packard and Bell Labs (UNIX) who have now fallen behind.

What is certain is that operating systems will gradually eclipse more and more of our lives. An increasing range of items and gadgets — which may include cars, kitchen appliances, home-lighting, even eyeglasses that can self-adjust in shade and power — are going to run on operating systems in future.

What these companies are vying for is not simply to become the master of one box or one device, but to become the operating system of our lives. That will be a position from which they can manage, monitor (and ultimately monetise parts of) the data flow of everything we do.

Google reads your emails before you do, technically that is, when its robots crawl through the content and serves up ads that it thinks are most relevant to the content of the message.

But it appears your daily digital log has more than just commercial value. Whistleblower Edward Snowden gave us a glimpse of how the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been hacking into servers to collect whatever it could lay its hands on. From breaking into the computer network of Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras, to monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, to sweeping up millions of French telephone records.

The documents Snowden passed onto the Guardian and the Washington Post also describe a secret project called PRISM, which is the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other US-based companies.

Because obtaining this data directly from the servers of the Silicon Valley giants would involve cumbersome US legal procedures, the NSA (and its British counterpart) under another project code named MUSCULAR is pirating telephone traffic and internet data from interception points — that are outside US jurisdiction — such as undersea fibre optic cables.

Once acquired, the raw data is dumped into NSA’s massive data centre in Utah. The documents show that Pakistan is one of the two countries (Iran being the other) from which the largest amount of data has been taken in. Quite surely, US spooks have been listening in to Al Qaeda chatter as well as keeping an eye out for a nuclear warhead going astray.

If what Snowden informs us is correct, then all your and my daily digital logs for the past several years may be available with NSA. As NSA’s robots crawl through the data, they look for any unusual pattern. So for example, if you were using a disposable mobile phone and switching on only long enough to make brief calls and afterwards switching off the phone, then that pattern would certainly mark you for special scrutiny. As technology improves, NSA would doubtless also be able to predict future behaviour and emerging patterns. Given the already hysterical levels of anti American frenzy in this country, it is important to remain steady when digesting this information. With the copious amount of data it has collected, NSA’s search engines and crawlers can pull out the digital log on any target — politician, government official, diplomat or private citizen. And whereas an “arms race” with NSA cannot be won, not even by Google, a complete review of our government and military communications procedures would be in order.

The writer is a strategist and entrepreneur.

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