French workers surf the Web an hour a day

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PARIS, March 22 (UPI) -- Workers in France spend nearly an hour of their working day in personal use of the Internet, browsing sites like Facebook and YouTube, a study indicates.

Research published this week said personal browsing made up more than half the time French workers were utilizing the Internet during work hours, with an average 57 minutes daily in personal browsing, Radio France Internationale reported.

Workers tended to browse news and social networking sites at the beginning of the day, switching to television episodes, radio and online games at lunch time and turning to traffic, weather and entertainment sites at the end of their shifts, the study said.

Personal Internet use resulted in a 13.6 percent loss in productivity, the researchers said.

The study was conducted in 2012 among 800,000 employees from 100 companies by Ofeo, an Internet filtering software company, RFI said.