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Anyone who crosses the German external borders with a mobile phone or enters by plane will automatically receive a welcome text message from the federal government when they enter the country.

And she has the talent.

It starts with the language: “The Federal Government: Willkommen / Welcome!

Please note the test / quarantine rules;

please follow the rules on tests / quarantine ", reads the confusion of special characters and German-English mishmash in the message, followed by a link to an information page of the Federal Ministry of Health.

What is behind the link is an example of how an information page for cell phones should not be designed.

The hardware hacker group “zerforschung” documented the details on Twitter in a cheerful tone: “... of course we had to click on them immediately!

... uuuuuuund: FULLSCREEN COOKIE WARNING, IN GERMAN "

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WELT was able to understand the results of the “research” researchers on a current Android phone with a Firefox browser.

A number of other problems also emerged.

If you click on the link in the SMS, you end up on a German-language website of the Federal Ministry of Health, which, depending on the browser, also displays a German-language data protection dialog.

This display fills the screen, even on a giant 6-inch, high-resolution smartphone.

If the user agrees, 19 cookies will be loaded onto their device, including those from Google and Youtube - including those used for marketing purposes.

Why this should be necessary on an information page of the federal government is completely incomprehensible from the point of view of experts.

Corona info page: are 19 cookies necessary?

Source: Benedikt Fuest

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If you manage to tap the tiny "Only necessary cookies" button with your finger (it is not even planned to completely deselect all cookies), you will see: "Coronavirus - Welcome to Germany".

This friendly greeting for the virus may confuse non-native speakers in particular, but the intention becomes clear further below, after a long legal notice in tiny black letters on a gray background:

“What rules apply to me,” it says, followed by a static chart in landscape format that would work fine on a large computer screen, but is completely illegible on a portrait cellular device.

The letters in the graphic are less than a millimeter high, even on the test phone with its huge screen and high resolution.

Country websites remain incomprehensible to travelers

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This is followed by a maze of links, including to pages of the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMG) and information pages for the individual federal states.

If you switch the BMG site to English with a clearly marked yellow button, clicking on the links will still end up on the German-language official website depending on the federal state.

The English option is missing there, for example in Thuringia, Schleswig-Holstein, Bavaria or Saxony.

The country pages are completely confusing for non-German speaking travelers.

If you accidentally click on a ministry link a few millimeters away, you suddenly see a stern portrait of Health Minister Jens Spahn.

Static, illegible graphics on the Corona info page

Source: Benedikt Fuest

The link to the website of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), on which everyone should check for themselves whether they are coming from a risk area, inevitably only continues in German.

If you want to continue in English, you have to open a ten-page PDF document.

However, this is also almost illegible on mobile devices because the line breaks do not work;

the Firefox browser does not even open the file.

A request from WELT to Vodafone, one of the three mobile network operators involved, shows that this chaos is the result of a week-long coordination process between the Federal Ministry of Health, the Federal Ministry of Economics, the Federal Data Protection Officer and the Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Link chaos quickly becomes expensive for non-Europeans

"The content of the SMS is specified by the Federal Ministry of Health and is always the same," explains Oliver Harzheim, Chief Security Officer at Vodafone Germany.

The entry SMS is not adapted to the language of the respective cell phone.

That would be technically possible, but it was not wanted, according to Vodafone.

Anyone who enters will automatically receive the message.

In order not to annoy regular cross-border commuters, the warning only comes up every seven days when they return to and from Germany.

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For those arriving without a data tariff for German networks, just calling up the link and the various PDFs can consume several megabytes of data volume.

That can cost travelers from non-European countries without an EU roaming tariff a lot of money.

Because not everyone who arrives in Germany can use a cheap domestic tariff, Vodafone expert Harzheim would have liked to include a central information number in the SMS so that travelers can simply call.

"But the BMG could not provide such a number ad hoc."