My parents told me about a time when people were scared they would get spied on if they had a phone in the house. And this it talking about a rotary land line...

For the record, old phone lines were always connected. You'd pick up the receiver and just ask the operator to connect you to a line, no pressing buttons or turning a dial or anything. Sometimes you could pick up the receiver and hear phone conversations your neighbors are having because a neighborhood might all be connected through the same switchboard. It was super easy to eavesdrop on your neighbors through the phones.

Rotary phones gave you an independent line, and allowed you to manually connect to another line instead of asking an operator to do it for you, but the mentality stuck for a while. Some people continued to be paranoid that someone might be listening to them through their phone.