Early telephone was inherently tracable, since you had to interact with an operator, who know who you were, who you were calling, and logged the call for billin

Early telephone was inherently tracable, since you had to interact with an operator, who know who you were, who you were calling, and logged the call for billing purposes. Public telephones added a slight wrinkle, but not much of one. It wasn't until the operator system was removed that conversations might appear to be untracable, but by then automatic logging and billing was in place and thus calls were as tracable as they were in the early days, and the public already knew that the police could/would 'trace calls' before this switchover, it had become a movie trope. So no, I don't imagine people were as concerned, at least with telephones. Post probably followed a similar curve - early post was person to person and involved an intermediary (horse rider/carriage driver) who probably kept some records, although in the very early days likely knew all of the people involved. Not until centuries later did national post systems come along with some semblance of anonymity to the act of posting a letter.