Several days in the past, Microsoft launched its Bing Wallpaper app within the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 and 11. When reporting about it, some blogs took an opportunity to clown on the new paid wallpaper app fiasco from a undeniable tech YouTuber. However, the shaggy dog story is on Microsoft, because it was once came upon that the loose Bing Wallpaper app is borderline malware disguised as a small customization app (no longer the primary time).

Rafael Rivera (@Inside ofRafael) took a dive into the center of Bing Wallpaper and came upon rather numerous attention-grabbing issues, let’s put it this fashion.

The app’s description within the Microsoft Store does no longer say a lot. It most effective guarantees “a collection of beautiful images from around the world” that refreshes your wallpaper each day. Sounds great. Under the hood, regardless that, hides rather numerous predatory practices. Besides “tapping” into your browser’s cookies (Edge, Firefox, and, after all, Chrome) and having a loose internet geolocation API, this factor installs Bing Visual Search and upsells Microsoft’s seek engine proper from the get-go.

There’s extra.

Bing Wallpaper can even attempt to alternate your browser settings, comfortably “recommending” seek that “gives back time and money” for the ones the usage of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and, slightly strangely, Internet Explorer. And it will no longer be a Microsoft product with out it seeking to set Microsoft Edge because the default browser with “different browser settings:”

Bing Wallpaper recommends making Microsoft Edge your default browser

World-class efficiency when surfing. Fast and safe seek effects with Bing. Tap into trending information and clever solutions. Built-in equipment to search out offers whilst buying groceries on-line.

There is much more.

If your default browser isn’t Microsoft Edge, your new wallpaper app one day will release the default browser (identical to Edge seeking to poach Chrome customers, once more) and open a brand new tab with a rather unexpected remark that “you’ve already installed Microsoft Bing Search extension” (not anything within the app’s description says about that) and all this is left to do is flip it on within the extension settings. Yikes!

The excellent factor is that you just should not have to make use of this adversarial spyware. There are quite a lot of nice (and loose) wallpaper apps for Windows 10 and 11. Dynamic Theme will mean you can have your Bing wallpapers with out hijacking your browser or extensions (it additionally appears nice with Windows 11-like UI); WinDynamicWallpaper can alternate wallpapers in line with the time of the day; and Lively Wallpaper, a 2023 Microsoft Store App Awards winner, allows you to have animated and interactive wallpapers. Just to call a couple of.