Is YOUR City"s Library System Ditching Access To Lynda.com Over Privacy Concerns?

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Long Beach California is the 5th lsrgest city in California. It’s the city in which I live. This is a cut and paste of an email I received just now from the Long Beach Public Library System. It is about LBPL’s decision to stop offering free access to Lynda.com due to Lynda. com changing it’s privacy policy as it changes to LinkedIn Learning.

Hello Long Beach Public Library Patron,

You are receiving this email because this email address is associated to a Lynda. com account accessed through LBPL.

We are writing to let you know that as of December 31, 2019, LBPL will no longer offer access to Lynda. com via your Long Beach Public Library card. Though your account will still be active with Lynda. com, you would need another access point to the system in order to complete classes or retrieve your certificates. We recommend you complete any classes in process now, and download or print all your certificates before this date. Library staff will not be able to log on to assist you in retrieving anything from your account.

We understand that Lynda. com is a rich and vital online learning platform, and regret we are unable to renew. Lynda. com is rebranding as LinkedIn Learning, and will require all users to create a public LinkedIn account with full and publicly disclosed personal information in order to continue using this service. After careful discussion, both within Long Beach Public Library, and with library systems around California and across the United States, we feel this is a violation of your privacy rights, as stated in the Public Records Act of the California Government Code.

Library staff are looking for alternative online learning platforms and expect to bring on new services in early 2020. In the meantime, we recommend exploring our current course offerings through Gales Courses which includes hundreds of highly interactive, instructor led classes on a large variety of subjects that you can take entirely online. As a library card holder in good standing, you are entitled to these courses at no cost.

We continue to fulfill our mission by selecting, organizing, and making library materials accessible in a wide variety of formats and look forward to continuing our support of your educational, informational, and recreational goals.

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Apparently our local library system is not concerned. Here is chat transcript:

13:05 me Will Lynda.com still be available to use after December 31, 2019?
13:05 Librarian Lynda.com is unfortunately unavailable now.
13:05 Librarian It has migrated to LinkedIn learning
13:05 Librarian You will still use your library account details to access the videos and courses, though
13:06 me So our library account will still provide free access?
13:07 Librarian Yes. You can access it directly from our webpage under our E-Library tab, and online tools. https://www.lynda.com/upgrade/completed
13:08 me Good news. I was afraid we might be losing free access due to the rebranding and new privacy policy.
13:08 Librarian if you previously had an account, you should still be able to access your old completed courses through the email you had on file, or if you already have a LinkedIn account, you will merge your old courses to your current Linked In Email account.
13:09 me More good news. Thank you for the clarification.
13:09 Librarian Of course! I’m happy to help!

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While my Library never offered this, I did have a Lynda account for a while and had a good read over the new Privacy Policy which concerned me when it was starting to become LinkedIn Learning.

I can understand why people would stop keeping their account. I ended up continuing to upgrade my account from Lynda to LinkedIn Learning as I had a lot of things I wanted to keep going and didn’t want to look for different sources but I’m still wary of things.

Quick link to save people a search:

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