Post by: John D. Sutter, CNN Tech writer

In the real world, rights and laws and such are pretty much known – but in the digital world that’s not the case, a Microsoft representative said at SXSWi on Saturday.

On the internet “it’s not 2011,” said Marc Davis, Microsoft’s planning architect and a former MIT Media Lab and Yahoo guy. “It’s really like 1111. It’s feudal. We’re living in an era of digital feudalism.”

“Who you are who you know where you’ve been where you plan to go what you’re interested in - all this metadata around your activity - it’s unclear today who owns it,” he added. “There’s no regulatory framework around it.”

Then things got personal: “Who owns the fact that you’re here right now - the record of the fact that you’re here at this panel,” he asked a yellow-lit conference room at a hotel in Austin, Texas, prodding me to think about the fact that I'd checked-in from the panel, tweeted about it and put the time and place on my online calendar. “ You can talk to different experts and they’ll give you different answers.”

One of the biggest challenges of our time, Davis said, will be designing regulations and a “digital bill of rights” to give people clear rights to the data that they store in the cloud, with companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

Right now user data is scattered across a number of online services – in big warehouses of computers all around the world. Davis and other panelists on Saturday did not as much suggest solutions to this problem as advocate that something should be done.

Davis said solutions will need to be international – he mentioned work the World Economic Form is doing in this area – and will become major topics of conversation in the next 3 to 10 years. Presidents will be campaigning about digital privacy rights, he said. And the U.S. Congress is already rustling about these issues.

Senators John McCain and John Kerry are reportedly supporting a bill that would give internet users an “online privacy bill of rights.” The bill is expected to get a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“There’s so much data about people being tracked all around the world,” David said. “But the architecture of he internet today isn’t structured in a way so that people don’t have control over their information.”

On a happier note, Davis did mention a few start-up companies that are trying to empower users take more control of the data they post on the internet, including Personal.com and Diaspora, which are like “private” social networks.

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