Microsoft is up to some shady old tricks again with…

Microsoft is up to some shady old tricks again with the new Bing Wallpaper app

The Bing Wallpaper app in the Microsoft Store on Windows 11.

What you need to know

Microsoft recently released a new Bing Wallpapers app into the Microsoft Store to give us, you guessed it, wallpapers from Bing.
However, despite its description, it looks like Microsoft is doing more than just serving up wallpapers using the app.
Bing Search, Bing Visual Search, and a 'helpful' reminder in your non-Microsoft Edge default browser are all 'features.'

Recently, Microsoft launched its Bing Wallpaper app into the Store, which, on the face of it, should be a pretty good thing. Bing serves up some of the best looking images on the web every day, and setting them as wallpapers is definitely something worth doing.

The app itself, however, seems to be concealing some shady tricks, with Microsoft trying its best to shovel its services on potentially unsuspecting users. It's described as:

"Bing Wallpaper includes a collection of beautiful images from around the world that have been featured on the Bing homepage. Not only will you see a new image on your desktop each day, but you can also browse images and learn where they're from."

However, Rafael Rivera (@withinrafael) has been poking around inside the app and found it's doing much more than that.

Probably safer to pay $50 than install this on your machine. It will automatically install Bing Visual Search and has code to peruse and decrypt your Edge and Chrome cookies. https://t.co/DQRaFyHhSQNovember 19, 2024

There's a whole thread below that initial post which details (in quite technical detail, no less), what's going on, and it doesn't make for great reading. It's bad enough that it's diving into your cookies, but this is my personal favorite.

Here's an example of one of MANY nasty tricks Bing Wallpaper employs.After some time passes, and you close your non-Edge default browser, Bing Wallpaper fiddles with it and open this tab on start. pic.twitter.com/nnuzYCRgVbNovember 19, 2024

I'm far from a developer, but I'm not sure that Microsoft would appreciate Google, or Opera, going inside the Edge browser and trying to divert users away from it. It does feel like something of an abuse of power, because you'd like to hope an app behaving this way from someone else wouldn't be allowed into the Store.

On one hand, I get it. We're the product, and our eyeballs (and our data) is the payment. Microsoft wants it, just like Google wants it. But yet again we're talking about underhanded tactics to force Bing/Edge on users, rather than selling the products on their merits. I use Bing primarily because it's integrated with Microsoft Rewards, for example. And Copilot is a pretty good AI tool, even if I wish Microsoft would make up its mind on what exactly it wants it to be.

But above all, nobody should install an innocent sounding wallpaper app and have all kinds of other crap shoved on them. Do better, Microsoft.