Until I moved to London from Brussels at the age of nine, I’d never seen a net curtain. Some people must have had them, I suppose, but no one I knew: on the Continent they were far from ubiquitous. Then I came across the very British sight of a row of terraced houses, each with its own prim little squares of yellowing nylon lace, shielding the occupants from prying eyes.

Of course, I immediately wondered what mysterious weirdness was going on behind the nets: it couldn’t have been terribly exciting, I figured, otherwise there would have been proper shutters or light-obscuring curtains. It must have been slightly shifty, though, since whatever was on display was deemed decent only if viewed through a sort of creamy haze.

Nobody is as obsessed with privacy as the British, or perhaps I mean the English. English literature, more than any other country’s, is stuffed with novels that hinge on secrets. Think of Graham Greene – shadowy men standing in empty streets whispering to other shadowy men, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be overheard – and E F Benson: the world seen through the prism of local gossip – small, triumphant incursions into other people’s privacy.

Privacy – both the jealous guarding of one’s own and the obsessive interest in other people’s – is central to the English character, or at least the caricatured version. What is British reserve if not an extreme horror of intrusion of any kind? Unlike Americans we find probing questions about our personal lives intolerable unless they come from intimates and we like to keep our domestic arrangements firmly out of sight, behind closed doors. Some people are capable of conducting entire conversations so obliquely that, despite chatting for 20 minutes, not one iota of information has been exchanged.

Which doesn’t mean to say that nobody ever gets up to anything – but, traditionally, whatever they’ve got up to has been private enough to seem almost furtive. Put it this way: no other nation on earth would have been capable of making Brief Encounter or of finding agonising resonance in the idea of two terribly decent people not having a love affair. Obviously, Brief Encounter was a long time ago, but the basic idea remains: “letting it all hang out”, as one elderly friend sniffily refers to any normal display of emotion, is vulgar, crass and best left to the poor people (in both senses) disporting themselves on Jeremy Kyle.

For the rest of us, keeping private things private is the only way to go. Husband on his sixth affair? “He’s being rather a bore at the moment,” says his wife, before changing the subject. Neighbour’s house about to be repossessed? You’ll only know once the removal vans arrive. And so on.

Thus it was the very core of Englishness that was threatened last week, when Google Maps launched its Street View application in the UK (it’s already in France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan). Street View allows 360-degree street-level views of roads in 25 British towns and cities, including London. More will be added. The photographing involved a fleet of cars with tripod-mounted cameras on their roofs pounding thousands of miles. You can now zoom in on ultra-clear photographs of these streets.

If I type in my home address, I can immediately see my house in minute detail – my bicycle, my spotty red-and-white watering can, even the basil I was growing last summer. Zooming in, I can detect the gleam of the chrome toaster in the kitchen. Scroll up, and I can see that my bedroom window was wide open when they snapped it. Along, and my neighbour’s study window is wide open, too (and her geraniums need watering). Down, and there are small children – in underwear, as it happens – playing in the public gardens. There’s a man in a white shirt, a woman sunbathing and a young mother with a double buggy.

The site has, inevitably, caused a furore: people wailing about privacy. Faces are supposed to be pixelated, but not all are and Google has been flooded with complaints about violation of privacy (hint: if you don’t want to be photographed throwing up in the street, don’t do it in the first place). According to a report on Friday: “Pictures are being removed or blurred by Google as fast as the company can process the complaints.”

Inevitably, Street View maps will reveal any number of scenes of ordinary British life: someone getting arrested, some poor bloke coming out of a sex shop, a man vomiting while another man (wearing antlers) stands by him, and so on. No doubt there are all sorts of people who have been caught on camera in places they are not meant to be – these images are available to anyone, remember.

I love the idea of panic-stricken members of the public freaking out because they’ve been snapped groping their neighbour or weeing on a hedge. I love Street View and have played with it obsessively (annoyingly, none of my neighbours or friends have been photographed swigging gin in the sunshine – I checked). However, the fact remains: the days of being able to get away with stuff are numbered – whether it’s an illicit kiss or nicking the lead off somebody’s roof.

Street View also has extremely useful applications: it will soon no longer be possible for unscrupulous estate agents or holiday rental companies to lie about their properties. If there’s a giant eyesore or rowdy pub or police cordon or crack dealer tucked neatly out of shot, Google Street View will find it. If the blurb says you can walk to the shops, Street View will show you whether that is true. If you’re planning on renting a house abroad, or want to see what kind of neighbourhood your hotel is in, take a look.

My geeky little heart finds all this absolutely thrilling: people should be able to find things out for themselves. Now, though, Brief Encounter wouldn’t stand a chance. The world of old-fashioned, furtive privacy is over. It’s a shame, because trysts are romantic and assignations are such an established part of the British emotional landscape. No longer would Greene’s civil servants or Benson’s gossips be out there: they’d be at home, Googling like mad and zooming in all over the place.

+ There’s been a peculiar outcry over the past week about Lucy Baxter, who has appealed for someone to have sex with her son Otto, 21. Otto has Down’s syndrome. “She is even prepared to go so far as to pay for a prostitute,” one newspaper reported breathlessly. Yes. And?

Human beings like having sex, and people with disabilities are human beings, so I don’t really see what the problem is here. I know that in New York there are prostitutes who specialise in sleeping with people with disabilities, much as one might specialise in sadomasochism, except it’s kinder and more civic-minded.

Equally, there exist a number of organisations whose purpose is to introduce disabled people to each other in safe, supervised environments, with the aim of encouraging them to form adult relationships.

More power to their elbow. The disabled are already marginalised in more ways than I have space to list here: do we also expect them to be conveniently asexual, like priests (ahem), just because we don’t necessarily love the idea of them having sex?

The furore over Baxter’s perfectly reasonable wish is the most ludicrous, priggish thing I’ve heard for a long time, though I do rather wonder why she took her quest to the newspapers when a quick trawl of the internet would have probably done the, er, trick.

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