In 1963, Andy Warhol filmed his lover, the poet John Giorno, as he slept. Using three-minute takes, the pop-art master recorded footage that framed the dozing Giorno with each shot replicated and spliced to span more than five hours. “Sleep” opens with a glimpse of Giorno’s nipple before traveling downward toward his midsection;each shot is incredibly intimate and an act of witnessing a person at his most vulnerable. This quiet, unguarded presence is part of the film’s beauty and a mark of Giorno’s courage. Even in the age of oversharing, most of us aren’t clamoring to replicate this extent of exposure. Sleep, after all, is private, and unlike Warhol’s film, is not always a sexy, silent activity.

In contrast to the drug-fueled party scene that surrounded Warhol’s life in ‘70’s New York, today we’re living in a wellness-obsessed culture in which cleanses are ubiquitous and group exercises like Peloton and SoulCycle are elevated to cult status. Paradoxically, though, we’re also unprecedentedly sleep-deprived: Seventy million people in the U.S. are dealing with chronic sleep problems. Couple that with the wildly inefficient state of healthcare, and it’s no surprise that about 30 percent of adults have turned toward some sort of fitness device like Fitbits or Apple Watches to help them track their steps, heart rate, and of course, REM cycles.

There’s been an uptick in people downloading sleep-centric apps, some of which are designed to record audio from a night’s rest—or perhaps the lack of—for documentation and analysis that might help a user identify patterns or problems, ideally both. The functionality of most of these platforms is simple: set your device next to your bed with the app open and on, then go to sleep. In the morning, you’ll have audio that the system will spit through an algorithm, analyze, and offer results. Often, these trackers will also generate a “sleep score,” a sort of benchmark to compare your rest to health standards. SnoreLab, for example, offers insight into a user’s volume and total hours spent snoring, while ShutEye helps break down recordings based on sounds like sleep talking, coughing, animals, and flatulence. Prime Sleep Recorder functions similarly, although it also advertises features to easily share your recordings with friends “via email, iMessage or post to Facebook.’ If this TikTok compilation of sleepwalkers is any indication, this kind of content can be incredibly entertaining.

Even if you’re not sharing your nighttime hijinks, though, there’s no guarantee others won’t have access to them. We reached out to SnoreLab, ShutEye, and the company behind Prime Sleep Recorder via email to ask about their data policies, and only SnoreLab responded. The company does not automatically collect recordings, but does offer an option to store encrypted versions on its server for backup. Similar to other apps, SnoreLab asks some users for audio samples when tweaking their algorithms, functionality, or making technological improvements. ShutEye’s policy is more nebulous, vaguely stating, “ShutEye will never expose your personal recordings under any circumstances. Sleep tracker will keep the collected information in the memory of your phone. The only reason why it will use these files is–compare and conduct self-education.” Apirox, the company behind Prime Sleep Recorder, admits to using third parties that have access to personal data, although it's certainly the most forthright about the potential for exposure: “Remember that no method of transmission over the internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure and reliable, and we cannot guarantee its absolute security.”

This is the crux of using sleep trackers. They might be designed to record snoring, but they'll inevitably pick up other noises like kids crawling into their parents’ beds, pillow talk, and sex. Even if a company is handling privacy well, there's always the possibility of a breach and that private information being disseminated without consent.

This is especially concerning considering we’re living in an age when Fitbit users have seen their data compromised and Alexa has been caught “eavesdropping.” As Geoffrey A. Fowler points out in the Washington Post: “I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.” Fowler’s digging revealed that a lot of what he thought had been kept private instead had been inadvertently recorded and stored—he also, unfortunately, goes on to describe analogous situations with his Nest and Chamberlain MyQ garage door opener, meaning Amazon isn't the only culprit. As the Seattle-based e-commerce giant prepares to launch its radar sensor devices to record people’s sleep, though, there are surely questions to ask about what additional security the company is putting in place to protect its users, a necessary inquiry that feels increasingly bleak considering just this spring, The Verge reported that third parties were harvesting data from Alexa to serve users targeted ads.

Given the high ratings, there’s no doubt that some people find sleep tracker apps helpful, although doctors and scientists are wary of their medical efficacy. As an undergraduate at Brown University, researcher Jin Yoon compared the results of ten home sleep monitors and concluded that they’re not the best assistance in diagnosing problems that often require genuine testing. “These devices offer much more accessible and convenient options for casual users to track their activity and learn more about their habits during both the night and day,” she writes. “Ultimately, sleep is best tracked through polysomnography,” a comprehensive medical study that records brain waves, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, breathing, and eye and leg movements and is more likely to identify the core problem. Not only are these trackers not particularly medically useful, but they also pose a risk: researchers have reported a rise in orthosomnia, or “the perfectionist quest to achieve perfect sleep,” that’s caused people to stress about achieving ideal rest. Ironically and yet not surprisingly, our devices designed to improve our lives might have the opposite effect.

This brings us back to the same question many of us have been asking ourselves during the last few years: is the risk worth the reward? For some, it might be, but perhaps as we make that decision, we can return to Giorno and the idea that once an intimate moment is recorded, it has the potential to be witnessed by unknown audiences nearly sixty years in the future.