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0 pointsdiggan8y ago0 comments

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

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shepardrtc8y ago· 1 in thread

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.

digganOP8y ago

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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