"Collecting data" isn't really avoidable though, or is it? it has to store and display your call history. The beef I have is "We may use this information to inform the ads we show you across our platforms"
Except for very specific niches of people who care about their privacy. Most people I have interacted with, don't care about this at all. I think that the real problem is how to make people more aware of the importance of their privacy. They only care about the usability and utility of the solution they're using. Which is unfortunate. But until they're more aware, nothing is stopping Facebook from doing this and lying to their teeth about it.
Obviously! They make money running ads, that shouldn't be a secret anymore at this point. So of course they will collect information to inform them.
If you don't want that, then you and the other 3B internet users need to start paying for the services you use
TL;DR: The Portal gadgets are built upon Messenger infrastructure and therefore collect the same kind of metadata which presumably ends up in the same big pot of information to be mined. That really doesn’t sound unreasonable to me and is actually kind of what any reasonable tech-savvy person would likely expect (it certainly matches my preconceived notions on the issue).