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Comment by omg_ketchup | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I'd agree- the data is accessible to anyone who wants it for free. There's no restrictions on creating the account.

Radio is free, but you hear advertisements. Probably better to create an account than to have product placement in the actual data.

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The restriction I'm talking about is creating the account. "Public" (at least for me) does not mean that I need to agree to some lengthy "terms of service", "privacy policy" and create an account. Public means it's public and can be accessed from curl or my browser of choice without signing a contract.

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.

- https://www.kaggle.com/terms

- https://www.kaggle.com/about/privacy

When Kaggle is saying "public" dataset, they're implying the origin of the dataset is public. Meaning, the datasets were created by various groups/companies/institutions and made available for the general public. Kaggle is simply hosting them again. They're doing us a service by organizing them all into one location and eating the bandwidth costs. My argument is that in return for that service to us, the least we can do is create an account with them.

I have no problem with them offering datasets to the public and just requiring to sign up for an account. But call then Kaggle-Public, Semi-Public or anything else, public data has a meaning that is not what they are doing.

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.

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