96It is in the light of, inter alia, those considerations that the Court has held that Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, read in conjunction with Article 3 thereof, must be interpreted as meaning that the scope of that directive extends not only to a legislative measure that requires providers of electronic communications services to retain traffic and location data, but also to a legislative measure requiring them to grant the competent national authorities access to that data. Such legislative measures necessarily involve the processing, by those providers, of the data and cannot, to the extent that they regulate the activities of those providers, be regarded as activities characteristic of States, referred to in Article 1(3) of that directive (see, to that effect, judgment of 2 October 2018, Ministerio Fiscal, C‑207/16, EU:C:2018:788, paragraphs 35 and 37 and the case-law cited).
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