Big Brother Britain! We get so annoyed with the government keeping an eye on our every move and holding all our important information, don’t we?

Well, before we organise a protest group and storm the Houses of Parliament we should be more worried about what our friends are finding out about us.

According to a new study by people search website, Yasni, more than a third of the people in the UK spend a whole day each month “stalking” and snooping on others online.

The study found that nosy computer users frequently peek into the lives of their friends, neighbours, work colleagues and even complete strangers using search websites, blogs and social networking sites as their main voyeuristic tools.

Yasni quizzed 1,412 people asking them how many hours they spent online, and how much of that time was dedicated to prying on the lives of others.

Over 60 per cent revealed they wasted more than 10 hours per month searching for information on friends, family, enemies, colleagues, themselves and even former partners.

However, it was the 38 per cent that spent a total of 24 hours “cyber spying” every month that really caught the eye.

On social network sites like Facebook – providing you are friends with someone – you have access to their pictures, conversations with other friends, personal information, work details, likes and dislikes to name just a few bits of what used to be considered private information.

On sites like Bebo and MySpace you don’t even need to be friends with someone to have a nose around their ‘page’ and see what they’ve been up to and even what they might be up to in the future.

These social network sites were originally set up with the best of intentions.

Bebo was originally set up to help travellers keep in contact with the various friends from different countries that they encountered on their journeys across the globe.

MySpace was, and still is, a popular place to launch and discover new musical talent such as The Arctic Monkeys, Lilly Allen and Kate Nash.

Facebook was created as a more professional version of the above two sites and was designed to help work colleagues, university graduates and school leavers to stay in touch with their friends and acquaintances as they moved across the country.

A bi-product of these social networking sites though, has been the ability they have given people to snoop and spy on... well, almost anyone they want!

There is even a popular phrase, “Facestalker”, for those who incessantly use Facebook as if they were a private detective, and a song parodying Enrique Iglesias’s hit song Hero, titled “I Can Be Your Facebook Stalker”, became a youtube sensation.

Social Networking sites are a fantastic tool for research, raising awareness of talent and bringing it to the mainstream, finding people you thought you’d never see again (for better of worse) and for keeping in contact with friends that move away.

But is dedicating 12 whole days a year to spying on friends, colleagues and strangers really what these sites were designed for?