Induction, Deduction and Incentives

I have been listening and reading about how strange data sets are being collected and used by various companies to make an educated guess at concepts that at first glance do not seem measurable. For example a very famous company uses the length of their lunch lines to figure out how much interaction is taking place. What?
Math was not my strongest subject and as I tried  to read up on this subject I realized that I have forgotten most of what I forced myself to learn in school. Despite my limitations I noticed the following oversimplified process.

1. They collect tons of data without knowing if it will come in handy or not
2. They go through the data with very very complicated math searching for patterns.
3. They observe to confirm whether reality matches what their formula spat out.

Now to the world around me and some Deductive reasoning by me trying to pass for an inductive one!.
I have noticed the following phenomena in Education.  The politicians or some rich person start with a hypothesis followed by the so called educational experts trying to find the data to prove their patrons point of view correct. I forget but I think this is Deductive Reasoning where the Hypothesis comes first followed by the proof.  Another name for this is 'top down logic'.
Here is the problem with deductive reasoning in Education. The experts in search of a patron will twist the data to prove the Politician and/or the wealthy donors' hypothesis. The educational experts will go out and create various data sets for this task.
The way corporations are doing it is Inductive where they collect the Data followed by coming up by the Hypothesis.  There is no Hypothesis nor a "Pet Theory"  backed by resources creating an incentive to make up spurious data.  The Data is there in plain site. It can be as simple as the lunch line, or counting how many students walked up the hill to get to class. All that is needed is collection of it for insertion into powerful computers with a fancy formula to crunch it.