- The Bing Wallpaper app is serving an ad in Windows 11
- The advert is for a Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movie collection
- There’s a rebellion against this blatant advertising, with a significant number of users saying they’ve immediately removed Microsoft’s wallpaper app
Some Windows 11 users who’ve installed the Bing Wallpaper app have been treated to an unpleasantly in-your-face advert for Harry Potter.
To be precise, it’s an ad for a collection of 11 Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies, and, as Windows Latest reports, this appears as a full-page promotional image that becomes your desktop background.
This isn’t happening for every Bing Wallpaper user, and it appears to be a regional rollout; but based on the plentiful Reddit feedback of the negative variety, it’s being piped to quite a number of PCs.
For the uninitiated, Bing Wallpaper is an app that serves up daily wallpapers to those who’ve installed the software — and note that it isn’t installed by default; this is something you have to elect to have on your Windows 11 PC.
Nevertheless, it’s an over-the-top move by Microsoft to shovel something like this onto the desktops of those who’ve chosen Bing to pick their backgrounds.
As one annoyed Redditor says, filing the Harry Potter wallpaper under the ‘unskippable ad’ category in the ‘Mildly Infuriating’ subreddit: “I had it [Bing Wallpaper] installed since up until this point it was a fairly harmless program that gave a variety of animals, environments or pattern backgrounds that rotate daily. Wtf?”
Replying, another Redditor observes: “Free software from a trillion dollar company means you are the product.” Some folks responded to that to say that Windows 11 isn’t free, but this Redditor isn’t talking about the OS itself, but rather the Bing Wallpaper app, which is a free add-on for Windows, of course.
Analysis: Bing begone
Windows Latest notes that the terms and conditions of the Bing Wallpaper app allow for “promotional offers” from Microsoft, but what’s happening here goes well beyond that. Frankly, this isn’t acceptable in any way — and Microsoft really should know better than to serve a blatant advert in this manner.
I’d say I was shocked, but ads have always been a problem in Windows 11. On top of that, about a year ago Bing Wallpaper was used to perform another underhand trick with desktops that made me cringe. In that case, an accidental click on the Windows 11 background fired up a Bing search (yes, really), and I called this “a new low” for Microsoft at the time.
This, however, represents Microsoft plumbing fresh depths. A notable number of those complaining on Reddit have said that they’ve immediately uninstalled Bing Wallpaper due to this incident (generally with a sprinkling of added curse words).
One of the politer comments notes: “Honestly if they cut out text and just left the base [image] with the option to right click to get more info and it took the user there it would be passable. But current state just time to remove Bing Wallpaper.”
This is very much representative of Microsoft’s different departments not talking to each other. On the one hand, there’s a big drive to fix Windows 11 and try to please users with all sorts of nifty changes and long-awaited features. On the other, the Bing Wallpaper team thinks it’s fine to deploy what might be the worst example of advertising I’ve ever seen in the Windows ecosystem — and there’s quite some competition for that accolade, sadly.
At any rate, I assume this won’t be happening again, Microsoft, given the reaction here… right?
