Stop Treating People Like “Users”: It Changes How We Collect
Language is the operating system of culture. When you call a human a 'User,' you justify abuse. When you call them a 'Client,' you enforce respect.
The Drug Dealer’s Vocabulary
Open any dashboard in Silicon Valley. You will see “Daily Active Users.” “User Acquisition Cost.” “User Retention.”
We have adopted this sterile, mechanical language without questioning its origin. We treat the human on the other side of the screen as a component in a machine—an input source that generates clicks and ad revenue.
This is tacky.
When you call someone a “User,” you are subtly giving yourself permission to use them. “Users” do not have rights; they have permissions. “Users” do not have lives; they have session durations.
This dehumanization is the root cause of our privacy crisis. It is easy to harvest the location data of a “User ID.” It is much harder to justify tracking the physical movements of “Mr. Sterling, the architect who trusts us with his business.”
The Tacky Habit: The Abstraction of Empathy
When we abstract the person into a metric, we lose our moral compass.
We add fields to forms asking for “Gender” or “Marital Status” because the “User Profile” looks empty without them. We interrupt their reading with pop-ups because we need to boost “User Engagement.”
We stop asking: “Is this polite?” We start asking: “Does this convert?”
This is the logic of a slot machine designer, not a professional consultant. If you are selling high-end services, your digital presence should feel like a handshake, not a shakedown.
The Professional Standard: The Client-First Syntax
To fix the data collection, we must fix the language.
Go into your codebases, your design documents, and your internal memos. Find the word “User.” Delete it. Replace it with “Client” or “Person.”
Watch what happens to your decision-making.
- Old Thought: “We need to track the User’s location to serve better ads.”
- New Thought: “We need to track the Client’s location… wait. Why? Mr. Sterling did not ask for that. It would be rude to stalk him.”
Suddenly, the “nice-to-have” data fields look like liabilities. Suddenly, the aggressive tracking scripts look like bad manners.
By restoring the humanity of the subject, we naturally drift toward data minimization. We stop hoarding because we realize that hoarding info on a client is not “smart business”—it is a breach of privacy.
Language is the first line of defense. Respect the name, and you will respect the data.
FAQs
Is this just semantics? Does it actually change anything?
Language shapes thought. If you think 'User,' you think 'Exploit.' If you think 'Client,' you think 'Serve.' It changes everything.
What should we use instead?
Client. Member. Partner. Or, if you are feeling radical, 'Person.'
Will this hurt our conversion rates?
It might lower the volume of accidental clicks, but it will raise the quality of the relationships. We want trust, not traffic.