I was born in 2002 and wasn’t really much exposed to the internet until 2012. I saw my older brother and sister watching YouTube on my Dad’s laptop in 2007 with a (presumably ethernet) cable, but I’m sure they weren’t using dial-up, and I think most people had abandoned it by that time.
Regardless, I was learning a bit recently about how dial-up worked, and saw that it was still possible to set up in modern-day; so it got me wondering what the privacy implications would be if I hypothetically were to use it. I imagine it would be terrible!
Sooo, dial up is slow. Very slow. But the data being transmitted over the physical cable is still using TCP/IP protocols to communicate with the broaderinternet.
Look up something called the OSI model.
The routers and switches downstream from you don’t care about the nature of your connection-fiber, copper, wireless, dial up, it’s all the same. Converted into frames which contain packets which contains bytes which contain bits, which are made up of 1s and 0s.
So from a security perspective? The line can be tapped, but that’s true of Ethernet and fiber as well. What’s amazing about information technology is that it’s built around protocols that exist independent of the physical equipment involved.