It has been said that many of us are more honest with search engines than with our fellow human beings.
As UK residents take to Google in droves to find out answers to their human rights questions, RightsInfo takes a look at what we can learn from the patterns in their queries.
Analysis of Google Trends data over the past 12 months reveals the term “human rights” was most popularly searched in Northern Ireland.
This is followed by England and then Scotland, with Wales in last place.
However, when breaking the data down according to cities, Belfast comes fifth.
Oxford tops the table of human rights Google-ing cities, followed by Cambridge, Nottingham and Brighton.
The market town of Halesowen, in the West Midlands borough of Dudley, comes in at last place.
The Google Trends statistics analyse the popularity of certain search terms before giving it a value between zero and 100.
Looking at the trends of time, searches for ‘human rights’ spike in Northern Ireland, far beyond its neighbouring provinces, in late October and early December last year as well as March this year.
As of July this year, those searching human rights across the UK are increasingly looking for information on the “2018 Data Protection Act” – which was introduced in May last year – especially those in Scotland.
Other rising queries include “where are human rights set out?”; “GDPR” – an EU Law known as the General Data Protection Regulation which came into effect last summer and sits alongside the Data Protection Act; and “human rights after Brexit“.
