Passing this on for smartphone owners. I still use a flip phone that I bought in 2006.
The keyboard hack seems like a legit concern. But it’s easily defeated by keeping your phone far away from the computer.
I’m surprised that a charger station could hack a phone. I’ve got a background in electronics. A charger just ties directly into the battery circuit. The power circuity and data are/should be totally separate. Unless the IPhone is doing weird stuff I haven’t heard about. Which is possible. 
#2 (fake “cell tower” hardware) may well work on plain cell phones.
I don’t know jack about iPhones, but the charger on an Android phone is just a USB cable which plugs into an electric jack at one end, and can just as easily be plugged into a PC for charging/file transfer. I can imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to set up a charging station with ready-installed USB cables to plug your phone into, which then proceeds to access your phone’s data.
But then again, this is Cracked we’re talking about, and in my experience their accuracy when it comes to reporting these kinds of things is somewhere between the Daily Mail and the Weekly World News, so I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.
PlaceRaider seems like such a useful thing for building 3D models. There’s no need to bury it inside a piece of malware. I want it in the open so I can make a model of my own room!
And the contactless-card scanner? Keep in mind that it’s scanning US contactless cards, which simply broadcast replicas of the unencrypted data on the magstripes of US cards. They contain none of the EMV encryption and handshaking used by other contactless cards in other countries.
There’s a grain of truth in these, but also a bunch of sensationalism. And there’s a world of difference between “it’s technically possible, with enough effort” and “this has a reasonable chance of happening to you.”
For instance - I’m not aware of any way the cell phone tower can actually turn my microphone on. They could make the party on the other end think I’ve answered the call, or they can try to intercept the call…but my phone isn’t set up to auto answer. The network (or fake network) can’t force that.
It works because the charger is really a small computer. That’s why you need something to analyze USB ports, like this:
Thanks for linking to clickbait I guess. Next do we get to hear about “This one WEIRD trick discovered by a mom that big <industry> hates?”