How to Block Facepunch's Spying Analytics (April 2019)

The guide to blocking Facepunch's Spying

The Ugly of the EULA

The EULA is something most people never read, and to be fair I don't blame most people since most of the things inside of it don't concern us and are far too long. But when a game like Garry's Mod randomly gives us a popup for a EULA out of nowhere, I felt like I should scroll through and see what FacePunch are trying to get us to agree to.
Here's some of the things that I don't like what-so-ever and I don't think you will either, this is the basis of this guide.

A. Technical Details. When you use, play or access the Facepunch Services we or third parties on our behalf may collect technical details about the device you are using, including: internet and/or network connection (including IP address); MAC address, any console device identifier; device events; your operating system, browser type/language or other software; and your hardware or other technical details.


B. Your Activities. When you use, play or access the Facepunch Services we or third parties on our behalf may collect details of how you use our services, including: metrics information about when and how you use the services; date and time of request and referral URL; traffic data; language preferences; in-game purchases; achievements; scores; gameplay statistics; time spent playing; and your geographical location data.


SUMMARY. We will use your information to run, maintain and improve the Facepunch Services as well as to communicate with you (e.g. with newsletters or emails). Sometimes we may share information with partners in order to run our services.

C. Comply with our legal obligations: where we are required to do so by law; and comply with intellectual property protection obligations we have under applicable laws including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the E-Commerce Directive.

We may engage third party service providers in the course of providing the Facepunch Services to you (e.g. data storage, server hosting, customer and technical support, game analytics etc) which may require them to access your information on our behalf.

Summary: You 'consent' to Facepunch logging your MAC address, IP, device identifiers, what happens on your PC, 'other software'?, they collect 'traffic data' which who knows exactly what that means, they will share your information with other companies, and they will 'comply with intellectual property protection obligations'.

Which may not be a problem to most, but the principal of all this data being collected and distributed on you is unsettling.

There's some more in the EULA such as removing access to Garry's Mod from you Steam account if you "say anything unlawful, racist, harassing, threatening, abusive, hateful, xenophobic, sexist, discriminatory, abusive, defamatory, obscene, invasive of the privacy of another person or otherwise offensive." but this guide won't be about that. Let's get onto fighting this now.

Blocking via Hosts Method

This method is a wee bit more advanced but I'll try to make it as easy as I can for you with a few commands in your CMD instead of traversing the Windows Firewall.
This method will have the same result as the empty read-only analytics.dll but if GMod updates to hide some more files throughout Garry's Mod then this method will still be fine (unless if they add more IPs). I'll keep updating the guide as the community finds out about more hosts but right now I think I've got all of them.

UPDATE: Willox has come here and confirmed that Garry's Mod does not use Redshell, I will still include how to block it in this guide as the concept of being tracked is universal and people do not like it. This will block Redshell for other games too.

Block files.facepunch.com at your own discretion, Garry's Mod tries to connect to this each time it launches so that's why I included the block. Everything in the game is still functional for me even with them blocked.
If you visit Facepunch.com then I suggest to not block files.facepunch.com, I will be looking into this now and I will update the guide if that block is unnecessary all together.
Edit: I'm still not sure why the game connects to that domain, clarification would be welcomed but until then it's up to the user.

I have updated the hosts file lines to include direct blocks to gameanalytics thanks to Willox!

Step 1

Go this this directory in your Windows: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and open up your hosts file with your text editor of choice

Step 2

Go to the bottom of the hosts file and add these lines separately as shown in the picture:

0.0.0.0 redshell.io www.redshell.io
0.0.0.0 api.redshell.io
0.0.0.0 treasuredata.com www.treasuredata.com
0.0.0.0 in.treasuredata.com
0.0.0.0 files.facepunch.com
0.0.0.0 gameanalytics.com
0.0.0.0 api.gameanalytics.com
0.0.0.0 rubick.gameanalytics.com

Step 3

When you're done with Step 2 don't forget to just save (not save as), next we'll move onto the CMD commands to paste in in order to block the IP addresses.
Press your Windows key and type in "CMD" and right click your Command Prompt and Run as Administrator


You can ping any of those sites we blocked in your hosts to verify they can't connect, if they can't and it looks similar to this then you've done everything correct!
Test it by typing ping api.gameanalytics.com
Or any of the above listed hosts

You can also try to visit one of the websites you put inside your hosts file such as redshell.io and it should look like this:

Summary

Disclamer

These are IPs found by the community and by me, block these at your own discretion. They seem to be working quite well for me as I monitor the traffic going in and out of my Garry's Mod and I can verify that the ONLY IPs my Gmod has going through it is the servers I'm connected to. Whenever I launch the game I can see the amount of blocked traffic detected rise every time as seen by the picture (13KB of blocked traffic after only a couple hours, 500B~ blocked every time I launch the game)
I am unsure of all to what files.facepunch.com is for, I've blocked it and I have not lost any important functionality. Some users reported their updates box at the top right of their start screen doesn't function anymore. I'll keep the block up there however if this is important to you then you can unblock it. I suggest you to unblock it too if you frequently browse Facepunch forums.


I'm not sure if Facepunch is collecting as much data as their EULA claims, Garry himself said it doesn't but at the same time why would it be in the EULA? They give themselves legal rights to do it by doing so, and if they're not distributing data (even though they say they do in the EULA) their partners are such as GameAnalytics could be. I hope this doesn't become a trend and I hope these things don't start getting enforced such as the censorship.


I hope this guide helped you, I will be fixing the guide up and adding/removing things as more information comes out from the community. If this guide disappears then it's likely it was taken down by Facepunch and I will have Garry's Mod restricted from me but at least it helped some people

Thank you to TheWizard and FrankGlass123 for finding most of the IPs/Hostnames listed on this guide!
Also thank you Goran_Rayman for helping finding an issue in the article regarding the hosts file!

Clarification of Read-Only Analytics.dll

I've since then removed this method as it wasn't serving the purpose that had been intended for this guide.

If you have made your analytics.dll read-only then you can delete & verify files for your game to get back the stock file, most people's files have already been reset already without you knowing likely and that's why that method had been labeled [Not Recommended] for 4+ months prior to being removed from this guide.

The read-only method made the file uneditable but it could still be removed & replaced during a game update which nullified the purpose, the hosts file can not be modified by Steam or Garry's Mod updating so I recommend to stick to that.

[aiden maaaaaan!]

they were going to make garrys mod woke and trans and jewish just like they did to Minecraft...

[Unbloated]

Thanks for the headsup! I don't know if it's outdated but better be safe than sorry!

[someSkyrimfan]

i was saying jesus christ as an exclamation because other people in this thread were basically saying the part in quotes, obviously thats an idiotic statement

[White ⁧⁧Wolf]

Indeed, and he/she doesn't understand that seemingly harmless information is used by big corporations to, among other nefarious things, more easily manipulate/control the masses.

[꧁Jay꧂]

That is a gross way to use Christ's teachings. @someSkyrimfan

[someSkyrimfan]

"The only people who shouhld be worried are the people who have something to hide!" Jesus Christ

[LaundryMan3]

hypers is fr the patriot agent

[Standomaster]

HYPERS defending the patriot act be like :

[White ⁧⁧Wolf]

bro you can't farm clowns here

if anyone has something to hide it's you with that avatar hover background

privacy should be a human right for everyone though, especially as peoples' harmless info/habits gets used to manipulate everyone more effectively

[HYPERS]

the only people who care about this ARE the disgusting people this is trying to expose