Thanks Hamster King!
My brother and his family were in Las Vegas last year and my nephew had a look at the slot machines. He saw that on the back of the machines was printed a list of the odds etc. In particular he read that the odds were for over the whole floor, not the individual machine.
In theory they could be, within the law. There’s now law saying that your “OMG Kittens!” machine (yes, there is such a thing) can’t have a better payout than your Ellen DeGeneres slot machine (I swear I’m not making these up.) Maybe OMG Kittens! has expectation X and Ellen has expectation Y; as long as you’re not monkeying with each machine in violation of the law, it’s fine that they be different, just the way your blackjack game has different EVs than the Caribbean Stud game. As Hamster King points out, you will in particular have a difference between mechanical slots that can’t be changed, and the electronic ones that can.
What makes the “payouts near the door” story a bit dubious is simply that it just doesn’t seem like there’s much of a point. The difference between a machine that pays back 99% and one that pays back 98.1% - and really, that’s the kind of range you’re talking about - isn’t likely to be noticed by anyone. Slot machine players will base their beliefs of payouts on faulty perceptions of what machines run “Hot” or “cold” in their eyes, or just what machines they find appealing.
The settings of the slot machines is decided by the slot manager. There are many different ideas used by different people. Setting the machines at the end of rows or near the entrance to be looser than others is certainly done in some places. Another common setup is to alternate tight and loose machines in the same row so the people who play two machines at the same time are sure to get one of the tighter machines.
For a slot machine manufacturer to be licensed to sell machines in Nevada, every machine that company sells world-wide must comply to Nevada regulations.
To insure that the computer chips are legitimate, a Gaming Control officer will occasionally choose a random machine and pull the chip, taking it to the lab for analysis. There have been a few incidents of counterfeit chips set to never pay out jackpots, mostly used in out of the way truck-stop type places and local corner bars; I’ve never known of them being used in any major casino.
Over the course of millions of plays, the machines will come very close to their theoretical setting. It is pointless for a casino to bother trying to adjust the settings according to how much a player is winning or losing.
I have been to casinos all over the world, and been to Las Vegas hundreds of times. Yet I can count on one hand the times I saw the back of a slot machine. They are always arranged in banks so access to the back of the machine is extremely difficult if not impossible. I would like to know what casino your nephew was in that he could look at the backs of the slot machines.
Without further evidence, we do not know if OP’s thinking is paranoid. To me it is a lovely case example, with well-thought out examples, of what could be done in any business outlet with–nowadays at least–a modicum of networked information.
Perhaps only recently the idea is becoming more widely known as an Internet thing: page-views on a site and/or on Tuesday mornings and/or after having looked at site x or y, etc.–any pattern of behavior can be used in the business of separating those exhibiting behavior from their money. The ads on your screen, for example.
The amount of micro behavior information tracked on all of us and available for sale, suitably parsed, is astounding. The huge marketplace is there for a reason.
All demographic research is the same. The regulations and social uses may differ, but “paranoia” is not necessarily relevant.
No, not that I’m aware of. (But even if I was, would I be aware of it? Hmmm…) It was more of a “what if / can it be done / why or why not?” I have a family member in the data business - collecting, analyzing, and predicting based on it. I drive past a casino every day, they have slots outside on a balcony (smoking area?). Which got me thinking - Do they know exactly which individual is playing a certain machine? In some cases, yes. Can they change the odds or manipulate the behavior of the machines remotely? Yes. Can they do that in real time and for the purposes described in my post? Sure they can. Is it legal? Apparently not. So most don’t. But I suspect that somewhere, somehow, some time, some casino will. Because money.
And yeah I’m paranoid as all f**k. 
Schizophrenic, maybe. 
Fun fact: The Wizard of Odds was the name of a TV game show that Alex Trebek hosted early innhis career.
I remember reading in one of those HOW TO BEAT THE ODDS AT GAMBLING books that the 90s/00s slot machines that had both the original pull lever along with the button press to start, using the mechanical pull lever gave slightly better odds than the electronic button press because according to the Nevada slot regulations mechanical and electronic games had different odds assigned to them, and the original mechanical ones were very slightly more favorable to players so any machine with two options to play had to have different odds whichever way you started it.
Of course its moot now with almost all slot machines being pure buttons for easier maintenance but its still an interesting anecdote.
In the absence of very strong and heavily enforced regulation then yes, casinos absolutely would do things like that, just as all other businesses are learning how to do as **Leo **said: mine customer behavior information for microscopic advantages on each transaction that add up to huge gains overall.
So the question becomes simply: are you gambling in a location with strong enough regulation & enforcement? In Nevada, almost certainly so. On a ferry boat between two islands in Malaysia? Not so much.
So each pull is completely random? Guess Ross was wrong about lurkers trying to steal your jackpots.
Not only is every pull random, the machine generates thousands of possible outcomes every second, so even if you were sitting at the same machine when somebody “stole your jackpot,” you would have hit the button at a different fraction of a second, and the result would have been completely different.
Phoebe, not Ross, was plagued by the little old lady lurker in Caesars Palace.
And Bally Technologies has a Friends slot machine.
Yes but it was Ross who told phoebe about lurkers.
At the risk of piling on this point–and cases could be adduced from now to doomsday–the following campaign struck me as particularly interesting/troublesome in that the network we plug into and which can be traced is us ourselves (we who have cell phones) without even “opting in” to the business environment, such as a casino, or even (as I had thought) even something so large as choosing to use Internet.
To the market, everything is the business environment.
Can’t wait for the Internet of things in our home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/business/media/see-that-billboard-it-may-see-you-too.html?mabReward=CTM&moduleDetail=recommendations-0&action=click&contentCollection=Politics®ion=Footer&module=WhatsNext&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&src=recg&pgtype=article
It is filed the NYTimes “Media” section–which is also interesting/troublesome.
See That Billboard? It May See You, Too
By Sydney Ember
February 28 2016
…
Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which has tens of thousands of billboards across the United States, will announce on Monday that it has partnered with several companies, including AT&T, to track people’s travel patterns and behaviors through their mobile phones.
By aggregating the trove of data from these companies, Clear Channel Outdoor hopes to provide advertisers with detailed information about the people who pass its billboards to help them plan more effective, targeted campaigns. With the data and analytics, Clear Channel Outdoor could determine the average age and gender of the people who are seeing a particular billboard in, say, Boston at a certain time and whether they subsequently visit a store.
…
ETA: for the interested, if you click reply to post, which reveals the URL formatting, you’ll notice the NYTimes’s data mining info.
Drive-by post above. Surprised it didn’t mention contrails and pizza joints.
Perhaps you will note that your own cite says many of the same things already mentioned -
Welcome to the SDMB, for various values of “welcome”.
Regards,
Shodan
Mmmmm. Pizza joints. Satisfy the munchies as you’re smoking. 
The mods really need to delete these drive-by thread shits from people who are so lacking in knowledge it’s a miracle their heads don’t implode from the suck.