Microsoft’s Free Wallpapers App Isn’t Private

Microsoft recently introduced “Bing Wallpaper” to the Microsoft Store. This free app offers up a new wallpaper each day, featuring an image taken from around the world. It seems like an easy download: Fresh, interesting, daily wallpapers, all free of charge. What’s the catch? Your privacy.

As it turns out, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be offering Bing Wallpaper to users for free without something in return. Engineer Rafael Rivera took a deep look at the app, and found some concerning practices from Microsoft within. Once the app is on your PC, Rivera says that Bing Wallpapers automatically installs Bing Visual Search as well, and includes code to browse and decrypt your Edge, Firefox, and Chrome cookies.

In effect, it allows Bing to spy on your browsing sessions in your various browsers, which in and of itself is an invasion of privacy. What’s more, however, is that Bing uses these privileges to add a new default tab to your non-Edge browsers. When you open, say, Chrome or Firefox, you’ll be greeted by a webpage that encourages you to enable the Microsoft Bing Search browser extension. If Microsoft can’t have you using its own browser, it seems it will try to persuade you to use Bing, at the very least.

If you use Microsoft Edge, you may not experience these interruptions, but Bing Wallpapers (via Bing Visual Search) will still spy on your cookies—even when using the browser Microsoft wants you to be using.