Technical, Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of Biometrics for Cloud Computing

This article addresses technical, legal, economic and social aspects of biometrics for cloud computing, featuring application example, gains of such solution, current laws, directives and legislation for biometrics and cloud computing. It is primarily based on Slovenian example due to common general EU legislation in the field of cloud computing and biometrics. Authentication on the Internet is still mainly done using passwords, while biometrics is practically not used. It is commonly known that everything is moving to the cloud and biometrics is not an exception. Amount of biometric data is expected to grow significantly over the next few years and only cloud computing is possible to process such amounts of data. Due to these facts and increasing security needs, we propose and implement the use of biometry as a service in the cloud. A challenge regarding the use of biometric solutions in the cloud is the protection of the privacy of individuals and their personal data. In Slovenia privacy legislation is very strong, it permits usage of biometrics only for very specific reasons, but we predict that big players on the market will change this fact globally. One of the important reasons for that is also the fact that biometrics for cloud computing provides some strong benefits and economic incentives. Proper deployment can provide significant savings. Such solutions could improve people's quality of life in terms of social development, especially in sense of more convenient, safer and reliable identification over multiple government and non-government services.