Advertising has a time and a place, and the place is never on the lock screen of a smartphone you paid a lot of money for. As if Huawei didn't need more negative publicity right now, the company has seemingly begun allowing advertisements for Booking.com on the lock screens of several of its phones.

A large number of people on social media are reporting that advertisements, specifically for hotel booking service Booking.com, are appearing on their Huawei phones. The affected models include the P30 Pro, P20, P20 Lite, Honor 10, and P20 Pro. The ads are appearing for device owners who are using the preinstalled landscape background wallpapers.

The ads don't seem to be limited to a certain region or country they're appearing on devices in the UK, Netherlands, Ireland, South Africa, Norway, and Germany, at the very least.

The only way to get rid of the advertising is to not use the built-in magazine background images. It's certainly not as intrusive or difficult to remove as the lock screen ads on Amazon Fire devices, but at least Amazon is upfront about using your device as a billboard.

UPDATE: 2019/06/14 8:32am PDT BY CORBIN DAVENPORT

Huawei reached out to XDA Developers to confirm the wallpapers have been removed from the company's servers, and should no longer be visible to device owners. If you still see them on your phone, swipe up from the bottom to bring up the toolbar, tap on the cross-shaped button, and tap 'Remove'.

Thanks: Eirik Jansson Haverstad