Earlier this week I filed a complaint with the IAPP's EMEA Office after my professional certifications were suspended for an entire day.

Let me be clear, I hadn't done anything wrong, I hadn't broken any rules, my certificates were in the middle of their 2 year CPE renewal cycle (valid until August 31st 2027) and I hadn't missed any payments.

What actually happened is I chose not to renew my Membership until the day it was actually due. I am a busy guy (just like pretty much every other privacy professional out there) and I don't take time out of my busy schedule to pay for something which is not due to be paid yet. My membership renewal date arrived - I received the email that it needed to be paid and paid it within 10 minutes of receiving the email - my certifications remained visibly suspended for the entire day.

To be clear, this is really bad for a professional - it doesn't look good when certifications get suspended especially when there is no reason provided for the suspension and especially when those certifications are often required by clients when bidding for contracts. To suddenly have those certifications be suspended for no valid reason could potentially disrupt a consultant's business and even lose them contracts or have existing contracts terminated.

I explained to the IAPP that this is really quite disrespectful of their Membership. I have been a member for over a decade, I have been a licensed training partner, a speaker, a knowledgenet country chapter chair (multiple times) and even have an award for my "volunteer" work at the IAPP and have the IAPP Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP) designation - yet they suspended my certifications just because I chose to pay my dues on the actual due date.

The IAPP know how busy their members are (because their leadership is made up of practitioners) so this mentality of suspending certifications as a means to literally intimidate members to renew, strikes me as pretty odd and incredibly disrespectful.

IAPP have been very aggressive on member renewals for years now and it was only a short time ago that I had to file a complaint directly with the IAPP leadership for their unsolicited direct marketing around membership renewals.

I have explicitly opted out of direct marketing from the IAPP which is my absolute legal right under EU law and as the global body for privacy professionals, they know this - yet they still bombarded me with marketing emails about my renewal months before it was due.

They eventually came to a settlement only to then, 1 year later, suspend my certifications for no reason.

The email about the renewal even states that there is a grace period:

"It seems your IAPP membership has expired. Your membership benefits will remain active for a short grace period."

Yet 10 minutes later, after I had paid my renewal dues, I discovered that my certificates were suspended.

To make it worse, despite the fact that the IAPP clearly has automated processes in place to initiate the suspension the second your membership dues are actually due - it then took them an entire day to re-instate my certifications - something which:

a: should never have happened in the first place according to their own "grace period" notification; and b: even when it did happen should have had an automated route in place to immediately re-instate them once payment was made.

I am not asking for anything for free - I understand the IAPP tax I have to pay in order to be permitted to do my job that I have worked in for over 20 years to an organisation I have been an active and productive member for over a decade - I get it, I don't like it, but I get it.

But when a professional organisation shows that their members are nothing more than a revenue stream to be intimidated into membership renewals every single year or risk being put out of work, questions need to be asked of the leadership and whether or not that leadership needs to be replaced.

I have known Trevor for 20 years but this level of aggression against IAPP members (long term or otherwise) is a leadership failure and Trevor, the buck stops with you. If you don't start to respect your members, you will lose them and another body will emerge to take your place and if I continue to see this type of behaviour from the IAPP perhaps I will be the one to start it, because this is completely unacceptable.

Trevor, you need to understand that without your members, the IAPP ceases to exist - rein in your marketing teams before it is too late - it almost cost you a lawsuit last year, it will start to cost you members if you don't get it under control in the near future.

To my readers, if you didn't already know, you don't actually have to be an IAPP Member to maintain your certifications and actually, unless you attend their conferences, it is much cheaper not to be a member.

You can instead pay the Certificate Maintenance Fee (CMF) which is $250USD and covers the entire 2 year period of all of your certifications combined. You still have to do the Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits every two years but there are many ways of doing that without having to be an IAPP Member.

At $295USD per year for Membership, the CMF route is less than half the price - yes there are benefits (reduced prices for conferences and training courses for example) but if you are not planning to attend the conferences or do any further certifications there is nothing really worth paying for in real cost savings or benefit terms.

I have been working with the IAPP for almost 20 years, have been an active and productive member for more than a decade - but there comes a point where you have to start asking - what is the value proposition? If I had gone the CMF route it would have been cheaper and my certifications would not have been suspended... #justsaying