Corporate tracking of your online activity is about to get even more invasive.

Internet service providers will soon be automatically able to collect information on browsing habits, health information, and other sensitive data from its users after the House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a repeal of protections put in place under the Obama administration. On a 215-205 vote, largely along party lines, the House voted undo these Obama-era broadband privacy rules that govern the behavior of internet service providers.

The rules, passed by the Federal Communications Commission, had required users to explicitly opt into data collection by internet service providers. Without these protections, companies like Comcast CMCSA, -0.70% , Time Warner TWC, +1.38% and Verizon VZ, -0.39% will be allowed to collect user browsing history, alter search results and monitor other online activity to sell the data to advertisers. (None of these companies responded to requests for comment.)

Approval of the bill came despite a backlash from privacy advocates and pressure from tech-savvy voters. The bill passed the Senate last week, and President Donald Trump is expected to sign it.

Consumers are already tracked online by advertisers, but the repeal of these protections will take surveillance to a more intimate level. Internet service providers have been campaigning to remove these regulations for more than a year. Without them, companies will be able to pre-install software to consumers’ phones that record every URL visited, insert advertisements across the web based on traffic, and re-engineer search results to direct users to sponsors’ pages rather than traditional searches.

“The decades-old legal right to communications privacy will be weakened as a gift to the cable and telephone industry,” Ernesto Falcon, legislative counsel at the digital privacy advocacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told MarketWatch. “These companies will begin monetizing your personal information by building profiles of your online activity and will no longer need to seek your permission to do so.”

Many ISPs already participate in some of the practices the FCC law is meant to prevent, as it hasn’t gone into effect yet. According to AdAge, some telecommunications companies have joined with data firms to sell information about user operations, including browsing and shopping history, demographic information and location. FCC rules were meant to make this kind of monitoring allowed only on an opt-in basis.

The repeal comes despite growing awareness about data collection and tracking, according to Michael Kaiser, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Alliance, a public-private partnership for online privacy and security. Some 92% of U.S. internet users worry about their online privacy and 89% say they avoid companies that don't protect their privacy, a 2016 survey it conducted found. However, only 31% understand how companies share their personal information.

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“It’s really important that consumers have tools available to protect their personal information and own their online presence,” Kaiser said. “The more companies clarify and make readily available to consumers information about how personal information is handled, the better they will serve consumers’ best interests.”

Consumers can still circumvent surveillance by using a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. The tool loops user traffic through a private, encrypted network rather than sending it directly to the servers of your internet company, obscuring your browsing habits from the service provider. It’s notoriously difficult to rank the best VPN services, but Freedom and Private Internet Access (PIA) are often regarded as solid choices, according to security experts, and cost only a few dollars a month.

However, Falcon noted, many consumers lack the “technical sophistication” to use a VPN — while more than 25% of people around the globe use VPNs, only 16% of Americans have used one, and it’s still largely considered a “niche tool” outside of those who use them to connect to their office’s virtual desktop.

Some have noted the FCC rules were inadequate to address the issue of online privacy. Writing in the MIT Technology review, editors Jamie Condliffe and Mike Orcutt noted that the repeal of these protections could lead to a more consistent solution to the problem in the future. “The FCC’s new privacy rules would have been dramatic, to be sure — but they would only have addressed one piece of the problem, leaving companies like Facebook and Google free to continue doing much the same thing,” they said.

NCTA — The Internet & Television Association, a trade association for the U.S. broadband and pay television industries, welcomed the decision to rollback the Obama-era FCC rules and said it “remains committed to offering services that protect the privacy and security of the personal information of our customers.” (Read the full statement here.)