Why are airport charging stations USB data ports?

The news is saying airport charging stations hack your phone, but if they’re just charging ports, how can they hack your phone, and why is the airport installing data cables as charging stations?

They’re using USB slots for charging because that’s the one cable everybody has for charging their phone. That’s the cable you’ve got in your carry-on bag. Never mind what the other end of the cable is, be it a micro-B or nano-B or whatever the heck they call tiny connectors these days. the other end is a regular old USB-A. It would plug into your computer in a pinch to charge your phone or, more likely, you use it to plug into the charger that came with the phone.

There’s nothing sinister about the airport doing this. Yes, with a standard AC plug, you could use your phone’s actual charger, but this way, you only need the cable, and a rack of USB ports takes up less space.

Yes, it would be possible for someone who had access to the airport’s wiring infrastructure and the time to do so to require those ports as full-on data ports and theoretically suck your info off your phone. But they really would have to change the wiring in the wall to do that. Or, they could just hide a small computer under a shelf, and place an innocuous-looking rack of USB ports on the top side of the shelf, in such a way that it looks like the airport installed it. That’s how the Mission: Impossible guys would do it.

The solution to that would be to use only those ports that look like fixed installations. Things that are built into the wall are much harder to hack.