Sure, I'm not invested enough in the outcome to drill down to the numbers but I'm happy to share how I would analyze it.

There are two choices the analysis; 'do nothing' which leaves the business as it is, collecting sensor data from the operation of the robots into aggregated data sets, and 'destruct on sale' which is a promise to delete any and all sensor data collected so that the new owner can not use it.

I am further assuming that at the time of sale the business has two components of value, its 'operational' value which is the annual recurring revenue of its subscribers/users less the cost of managing the revenue, and 'residual' value which consists of company assets such as the physical plant (offices), algorithms or patents, real estate holdings, and data sets.

In the 'do nothing' case we assume that subscription rates ($SUBS) stay the same (so revenue is unchanged) and that the data set accumulated has some value (say $DS)). Using $SUBS as the revenue model, $ASSETS for the stuff that doesn't change in either choice (office, patents) the value generated by the company would be something like:

years * $SUBS + $ASSETS + $DS.

And in the scenario where you argue that destroying the data would result in more users it would be

years * ($SUBS + $Delta) + $ASSETS.

Does that make sense so far?

So my analysis would say that the 'better' choice is the one that generates more value over time for the company. And given the structure above that depends entirely on one thing, is the value of ($DELTA * years) greater or less than the value of $DS.

Next I'm going to stipulate that the value of $DS has a 'years' component as well since the data set keeps customer data regardless if they are a current customer or not. So the more customers you've had over the years the more value $DS. And using that stipulation I'm going to simplify the analysis to just the comparison of $DELTA and $DS.

Then I'm going to ask can we characterize the size of $DELTA? And I will argue, perhaps unfairly, that $DELTA would consist entirely of people who 'care about privacy.' Then I'm going to look at all of the experiments in tech where the differentiating factor of the product was 'privacy' or 'less tracking' and compare their addressable customer market to the the overall market. (I actually got to 'live' this advocating the privacy features of the Blekko search engine to people)

Then I'm going to argue that while there are many people who will talk about their concerns around privacy and security the number that will change their behavior relative to that concern if astonishingly small. It shouldn't be but there are examples all around of how it is. And based on that argument I'm going to argue that $DELTA is very small, 1 or 2% of the subscriber base at best.

Then I am going to talk about the challenges of developing a dataset like $DS. How difficult it would be for anyone to create such a data set without a way of explicitly running a sensor suite in thousands of homes. And given how hard it is to compete, that someone with sole possession of that data would have a competitive advantage over others who might seek to use it, or might have a salable product based on that data that nobody else could offer. (joke idea: use it to validate square footage numbers in Redfin listings). I would argue that this data set which would be unique in the world would be very valuable, and assert that $DS was >> $DELTA and so the right choice for the company was to keep it.

And in that analysis, if the most value would be maintained by keeping it, then changing the company so that it could not be kept would impair the value of the company and violate the fiduciary duty of the board.