My wife and I moved to Penarth in 2024. For her it was a homecoming: she’s from Cardiff, and we met at university many years ago. For me it was something newer. I have Welsh roots on my mother’s side and Irish on my father’s, which is how I come to be called Owen Campbell, but I was born and raised in England and had lived there all my life. We stayed because that’s where our work was and where our children were doing well at school. When neither of those things held us any more, we came here.
Since arriving I’ve tried to do it properly. I’ve learned my way around Welsh politics, and I’ve signed up for Welsh language classes starting this September. I didn’t want to be someone who just lives here; I wanted to take part.
It also made me look again at a problem I’d been grumbling about for years.
I joined Facebook and Twitter not long after each of them started, and I left them a long time ago. These days I refuse to use anything owned by Meta at all. I’ve written before about why I make choices like that, and I accept what they cost me: plenty of clubs, groups and communities organise on Facebook, and I’m not in them. That’s fair enough. My choice, my loss.
But it stops being fair enough when official things live behind the same doors. Council announcements. Consultations. Local services. More and more of civic life assumes an account with an American company, and if you decline the account, you’re not really declining Facebook any more. You’re declining a bit of your own citizenship.
None of that is unique to Wales. It was just as true where we lived in England, and it has irritated me for just as long. I don’t think anyone designed it to work that way; I think it just happened, one convenient decision at a time.
What’s different in Wales isn’t the problem. It’s the chance of doing something about it. Schools, the NHS, councils and procurement are all devolved, and those are exactly the places where this stuff bites. Wales is small enough for one argument to reach the people who decide. And other small countries, Denmark and Estonia among them, have already shown what’s possible. In England the problem always felt too big for me to reach. Here, it doesn’t.
I’ve been a software engineer for over thirty years, and I’ve been writing here about privacy and open technology since 2008. So I did the only thing I’m qualified to do: I wrote it up, carefully, with sources.
The result is a short paper, Digital Independence for Wales . Its argument in one sentence: no one in Wales should need an account with a company outside their own legal jurisdiction to go to school, see a doctor, pay for parking or deal with their council. It looks at what Denmark, Germany, France and Estonia are already doing, at where Wales stands, and at what a small country with devolved powers could do next. It also tries to be honest about the difficulties, because there are some.
In keeping with its own argument, the paper doesn’t depend on any platform to exist. It’s published on my own site with a signed PDF, its source lives in a public peer-to-peer repository, and it’s mirrored on peer-to-peer networks. Anyone can copy it, verify it came from me and pass it on.
The new Senedd’s committees are currently asking the public what they should prioritise for the next five years, so I’ve made a start: my submission to the Economy, Energy and Connectivity Committee’s priorities consultation went in on 23 July. The consultations are open to anyone until early September, and in the meantime I’ll be putting the paper in front of anyone else who’ll read it.
I’m not a policy professional and I don’t have an organisation behind me. I’m one resident of Penarth who thinks Wales is well placed to lead on this, and who would rather make the argument than grumble about it. If you read the paper and think I’ve got something wrong, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.