I also wouldn’t talk about it in mixed company if I were listening to this sort of ‘we assume it’s secure because we can’t see it’ traffic; but given their lobbying clout, I suspect that some of the potentially interested parties would be well into the Murdoch zone of substantial impunity.
As for utility; I suspect that pager traffic is among the dirtier options(obtaining it from the entities that purchase it from pharmacies is probably a lot more neatly formattted); but it isn’t without its virtues: much less cumbersome than ingesting paper records, since it’s all digital and a mixture of text and assorted codes and control characters, no audio to deal with; and since the design of the pager system relies on the broadcast indicating exactly which pager a given message is for, so the others can ignore it; which offers a very handy layer of metadata to help organize the chatter.
Persistent (to the degree the hardware survives) identifiers; timestamps and recipient IDs on all messages(though location data isn’t terribly granular, messages are broadcast and client devices don’t transmit); and it’s a boring-but-important legacy thing which probably means that heavy users don’t change behavior/switch vendors/etc. all that rapidly.
As noted; probably not the best option if you have alternatives; but for what little it would cost to systematically collect it is unlikely to be anywhere near the top of the list in terms of worthless logs people keep.
