Irreversibility changes what verification is worth
A data deletion request asks a system to permanently remove a specific principal's data — an action whose irreversibility sets it apart from an ordinary read, and even from most ordinary write requests, where a mistake can typically be identified and corrected afterward. Once data is genuinely, permanently deleted, a wrongly authorized deletion generally can't be undone the way a wrongly granted read or a wrongly applied edit usually can be.
This asymmetry directly justifies treating identity and authority verification for a deletion request more rigorously than for routine access: the cost of a false approval here is categorically higher than the same false approval would be on a reversible action, which is precisely the situation where additional friction at the point of authorization earns its cost rather than being an unnecessary inconvenience.
Verification proportional to what's actually being lost
Practical designs scale verification to the deletion's actual consequence — additional confirmation steps, a mandatory delay before the deletion actually executes, or independent approval separate from whoever initiated the request — rather than treating every deletion, from a single low-stakes record to an entire account's history, identically. The goal is making the friction proportional to what would actually be lost if the request turns out to be mistaken or illegitimate, not applying the same heavy process uniformly regardless of stakes.