A program that grants points for using Bing search, which users can redeem for gift cards, sweepstakes entries, or charitable donations.
Sure does seem that way.
A year ago, you could get Shop points simply by browsing through Bing and making a purchase through whichever retailer was a part of the program. Somewhere along the way, MS changed that and now requires the user to manually activate Shop points by going through extra steps in the browser. MS never bothered to notify users about this change.
Screwing the users, indeed.