How about you let me download them without creating an account before calling them “public”?
Definitely understand the motivations from a user standpoint for not needing to login to download.
There's some non-obvious benefits we get as a small team by requiring login, in addition to new user growth. Bandwidth for hosting data can be large, and it's easier to reason about and prevent abuse in the context of authenticated users.
We do enable previewing the dataset while logged out, and the preview functionality will become more full-featured.
That sounds like you are inflating your user counts with garbage accounts.
I interpret it charitably as "some fraction of users forced to register in order to download data go on to become active users of the platform".
Kaggle outsources data analysis to bright students willing to work for a tiny fraction of their actual worth. Their business model has nothing to do with their own analytics talent.
I recall — some years ago — when they were advertising for Jobs, some of the criteria for potential technical fitness was a high placement in some of the competitions. Plus, I have engaged in a few of the competitions and you have to have a team of capable data scientists to design them. They are not clueless people.
For example, this post - http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/06/06/weve-passed-1-million-memb... - talks about a million users. But does not say how many are low quality, inactive ones. Or even describe how they filtered out low quality users from their analysis.
There are certainly benefits to you as a host if you restrict access to as a host. But if you have bandwidth concerns, perhaps just link to the source.
As it is now, I may be confused that you are using open data as a way to drive user growth.
The biggest issue is that I cannot share my work with others (easily) if I use a dataset from Kaggle. For example, ideally I just want to have a notebook online somewhere which can be instantly downloaded and run by anyone. Having to (automatically) download a dataset is a hinderance, and having to create a kaggle account first is an outright blocker.
On the other hand using, for example, IPFS or a torrent would be better, because you can reference the dataset using a global identifier and anyone can easily get access to it.
Radio is free, but you hear advertisements. Probably better to create an account than to have product placement in the actual data.
Not sure were you are from, but where I'm from (Sweden), public radio (not free but public) and public TV is free of advertisement and does not require me to sign up for an account to be able to listen to/watch it. That's what I call public.
For example, the government where I live (Catalunya) has public data. So I can go to the website and click download, no account required. If that data was distributed via Kaggle and requires account signup to get, I would not consider what they are providing public.