Get ready to say good-bye to your online privacy. Not that you ever really had it anyway.

The House of Representatives voted today to reverse Obama-era regulations preventing internet service providers from selling your web browsing history on the open market. A few Republicans broke rank to vote against the resolution, while Democrats stayed unified in opposing it. (The Senate's approval last week stuck strictly to party lines.)

The rules, passed by the Federal Communications Commission last year, have yet to take effect. If President Donald Trump signs the resolution, they never will. What's more, the measure bars the FCC from passing similar protections in the future. Even if Trump were to have an unexpected change of heart, the current FCC chair signaled earlier this month that he would likely kill or suspend the rules anyway. In the meantime, your internet provider is already free to sell your data without your opt-in permission.

All of which means you'll need to take your online privacy into your own hands. Several technical workarounds—especially virtual private networks, or VPNs—will return some semblance of control to you, the internet user. But even these solutions are far from perfect. When it comes to privacy, tech can help. But it doesn't take the place of having the law on your side.

Opting Out

The most basic thing you can do if and when your service provider tries to collect and sell your data? Switch to another provider—assuming you can find one that won't turn around and do the same. You might have a better chance in the wireless market, where four major carriers are competing for your business. But providers face so little competition in the home broadband market that you might be stuck.

Even if you can't switch providers, you might be able to opt out of having your data tracked. But you need to know that your provider is tracking you in the first place. Even then, carriers haven't always been transparent about how to opt out anyway.

Case in point: In 2011, security researcher Trevor Eckhart discovered that AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile all sold smartphones with preinstalled tracking software. Carrier IQ could track everything from the websites customers visited to Google search terms–ostensibly for troubleshooting purposes, not advertising.

An FCC investigation later caught Verizon secretly bundling phones with its own tracking files known colloquially as "zombie cookies." The carriers eventually killed off these programs. But if not for the work of dedicated researchers, customers would never have known they existed in the first place. That's why laws requiring that internet providers seek explicit, opt-in permission before selling data are important.

Virtually Private

Many security experts recommend that you use what's called a virtual private network, or VPN for short, to protect your privacy. In effect, VPNs route all your traffic through their service. Instead of your internet provider having a list of websites you've visited, you'll only ever appear to connect to one particular server.

While VPNs are an important privacy tool, they have limitations. The most obvious: You need to trust your VPN provider not to track you and sell your data itself.

While using a VPN, you might find that you can't connect to all the sites and services you're used to using. Netflix, for example, tries to block all VPNs to prevent people from accessing content not licensed in their home countries. Others sites may block particular VPN providers used by malicious hackers or criminals to cover their tracks. It can be hard to tell if you can't access a particular site because you've misconfigured your VPN software, the site is down, or if a company has blocked your VPN provider from accessing a site.

Privacy tech doesn't take the place of having the law on your side.

Tor, privacy advocates' favorite browsing software, tries to anonymize your internet use by routing your traffic through multiple servers around the world. It's free and, since it's an open source project tied to no company, at least partially solves the trust problem. But it's more complex to set up, typically slows down your connection speeds, and malicious Tor servers do exist. Many sites and services also block Tor. Regardless, neither VPNs nor Tor would protect you from software like Carrier IQ that tracks what you do locally.

Don't get us wrong: VPNs are a good way to protect your data, especially on public Wi-Fi networks. And it's important to pay attention to the fine print of your internet contract to find out how your data might be used, regardless of what laws are in place.

But by placing the burden of privacy entirely on consumers—and letting internet providers off the hook for wheeling and dealing in customers' personal data, Congress is effectively conceding it has no good long-term solution for protecting Americans' privacy. Internet providers rely on cables that run under and above public land. Wireless carriers rely on the public airwaves. The biggest providers are publicly traded companies. It only makes sense to place the responsibility for keeping customer data safe and secure on these companies. Whatever happens to the FCC's rules, the public will need to keep fighting to hold the telecommunications industry accountable.

Update at 6:40pm ET on 3/28/2017: This story has been updated to reflect the House vote.