Is there an OS wide manner for opting out of display advertisements on Windows 8?

I am running the enterprise evaluation version of Windows 8 and wonder if I missed a setup step to opt out of the advertisements in some of the tiles like the one below.

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I have not yet turned on location services and am less worried about tracking at this moment than just not seeing the ads as I explore the OS. I'm not looking to ban all advertisement, just the ones that come with the bundled application tiles and the core system.

Did I mistakenly opt-in or enable these? If not, can I disable them system wide in a setting or two (or by hook and crook if necessary)?

Answer

As it currently stands, there's no way to opt-out of the ads. The "Ads in Apps" framework is provided by Microsoft to App creators as a unified advertising system to make monetizing their programs easier (and probably so MS gets a cut as well).

Just because the apps may have been bundled with Windows, doesn't mean the app creators don't (also) want to get paid by advertisements. :)

The assumption is that the ads are paying for the service that the App is using to give you information, not for paying for the app itself (eg: Weather2Travel.com in your example needs to keep their servers up to make the app useful).

Looking into my crystal ball: Will someone eventually figure out how to block them? Probably. Will MS change the framework so that the blocks don't work anymore? Probably. Will this be an endless battle? Probably. ;)

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