A few years ago, I sent a message to Stripe about a problem with its documentation (they let you switch examples to be in different languages, but at least some Java examples showed up as C++). They not only sent a personal message saying they fixed it, but also offered me a free tshirt. It really sent a message that they cared about documentation.
I like swag with blinking lights. A buddy and I used to go to the big embedded systems conference in San Jose and compete to see who could score the most development kits. You'd have to chat with the reps a bit to show that you knew how to use their gear before they coughed up anything good. We'd walk out with a thousand dollars of free gear on a good year. How loose the reps were depended a lot on the economy that year. It was a lot of fun.
Cheap t-shirts and socks? I'm less than impressed so far. I'm sure corps are still giving out better swag. You who are almost out of runway, salute us! ;-)
Meh, the only swag I ever got was one of those 3D hand tracking fancy things whose closed-source license wasn't compatible with blender and didn't work all that well on linux.
I don't think that iOS/android devices are spying on us, but I also don't think the Amazon echo is either. In both cases you are trusting a large company to not record you - in one case you trust apple/google to deactivate the mic on your phone when it isn't being used, and in the other case you trust Amazon to only send recordings to their servers when you say the keyword. If anything I would trust Amazon more, since the echo has a physical switch to turn off the mic. So I don't really see the difference between a phone and an echo as far as privacy is concerned.
