But those VHF pagers transmitted all the rest of your data in the clear unprotected, it just didn't have your location or any knowledge if you received the message.
Well, you are right. But the message as well as the medium can be privacy-respecting. Even with encrypted messages, a lot can be extracted from metadata that is a part of the medium.
These days pager tech has advanced to support public-private key encryption for messages. So the messages being in plain text is less of a concern.
But should that not be the case, here's data collected via cell-phone that was mishandled - https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/southwest-valley/2....