Conclusions: Fair Use of Communications Metadata in European

This work inquired about how communications metadata can be used in criminal proceedings with regard to the principles of legality and fairness. This question was addressed by employing a doctrinal interdisciplinary research method between different areas of European law multi-level legal framework (i.e., privacy, data protection, and criminal procedural rights) and inputs from other fields of knowledge, such as legal philosophy (i.e., Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness). The analysis also integrated a functional comparative method of national rules for using communications metadata in criminal proceedings in selected EU Member States (i.e., Italy, France, and Spain).