Why bulk concentrates risk that individual access doesn't
A bulk export retrieves a large volume of data in a single action, rather than through many individual requests spread out over time. Even when the requester is independently authorized for every record involved, the bulk action itself concentrates what would otherwise be gradual, scattered exposure into one discrete event — a single successful export can walk away with far more than any individual request in the same authorization scope would ever return on its own.
This is what makes bulk export worth treating as a categorically different action from the individual reads it's built from, rather than simply the same permission applied many times over. The aggregate risk of one export event is not well described by the risk of any one record it contains.
Scrutiny proportional to what's actually at stake
Practical responses scale with how much a given bulk export could expose: additional approval specifically for large exports, tighter and more visible monitoring on export actions as their own category of activity, and rate limits or size thresholds that force a human decision point before an unusually large export proceeds. None of this needs to apply to every read — it's specifically the aggregation itself that warrants the extra layer.