"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| Yes, but sounds at best "salesman", and at most insulting (to those he
| interacts with, not to him) "teacher of idiots", i. e. someone whose job
| is to tell stupid people what to do.

I don't think it's any of those things. It's just
reason having gone through the filter of bureaucracy.
The FTC has the job of regulating business to prevent
exploitation of "consumers". But government in the US
is largely owned by business. If the FTC is too helpful
then lobbyists will go to Congress and complain. Then
Congress will threaten to cut FTC funding. Our national
anti-hero, Mitch McConnell, might even threaten to
defund the FTC altogether and arrest the staff for
crimes against the rich.

So the FTC needs to do their job by not letting companies
like Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple become monopolies
(woops), but they can't afford to do it too well. So how do
they look useful? They offer consumer advice. How do they
do that without warning consumers against businesses that
are trying to cheat them? Well, they could issue bulletins
about Microsoft forcing spyware services on people who buy
their OS. Or they could warn consumers that they're paying
Apple 2-3 times what their product is worth while Apple
evades taxes, uses slave labor in Asia, and actively fights
against their right to repair the device they overpaid for.
But that would be helping consumers at the expense of
business.
So instead they issue trivial officialese about the importance
of keeping software up-to-date. Almost everyone, including
many tech people, agree with that. And it supports the
idea of buying more product from unregulated monopolies.
So everyone's happy.

Last week I was in Microcenter buying a monitor. The clerk
mentioned that a 4K monitor might be what I want for
graphics. I said no, that I only need good color display with
IPS, and anyway, I'm on XP. He told me I should update but
that I'd be OK as long as I didn't connect to the Internet.
I smiled. He looked taken aback. I didn't say anymore. Where
would I start to explain that he was parroting nonsense and
had no understanding of online security?.. And that even
now his computerized doorbell and phone were probably being
hacked because he thought he was protected by his dutiful
updating?
There was a grain
of truth in what he said. And it's good for selling computers. And
it won't get him into trouble. So what else is he to say? He
can't very well start explaining javascript, HOSTS files, and
so on. Which he probably doesn't understand, anyway. And if
he did try to explain to people, sooner or later someone would
complain to his supervisor that one of the clerks is acting
odd.

Maybe the correlate in Britain would be if the ambulance
drivers union got the government to stop safety warnings
in mass transit and instead install lighted signs underneath
the station landings that can only be seen by someone
laying on the rail tracks, saying, "Mind the gap".
This kind of thing is why we used to have Monty
Python.