It's a great question. My short answer to that is no, but I want to start by saying that it is the current model.
The current model with PIPEDA, as with legislation worldwide, going back to the OECD guidelines on data protection in border flows, has been based on this notion of technological neutrality: that we design several key foundational principles and that those principles ought to apply across any technology, whatever technology it is. So if you look at the ten addendum points to PIPEDA—things about accountability, about consent—all of these ten principles are meant precisely to do what you just talked about, namely, to have one law that applies to all.
I'm not convinced that it will work across the board, but that having been said, I don't have the worry that I think is implicit in your question, which is that if we go down this road we're going to need to have ten laws for ten different kinds—or hundreds—of transactions online.
I do think that in the context you bring up—for example, e-commerce, social media, children's sites—the way we would design defaults in those situations would still be focused on the fair practice principles for information collection, use, and disclosure. So the defaults would be dependent upon whether and to what extent information is being collected. I do think that we will be able to study and to think carefully to define defaults that would work across a general array of technologies, the purposes of which are information collection, use, and disclosure, which are the three buzz phrases attached to PIPEDA.
I don't see particularly why that necessarily wouldn't be the case, because the defaults are around collection, so either you collect or don't collect. If you do collect, set a default that's more towards whatever the privacy context is in the particular context we're talking about.
In the same way that there are hundreds of models of automobiles, and there are motorcycles, and there are now these new electronic bikes that you see everybody puttering around the streets of Ottawa on, we haven't had that much trouble figuring out how to make speedometers for all of them. We've standardized various tools of feedback. I think we can do it here too.