Raspberry Pi OS • Re: Camera Access Privacy Settings Location

You're correct that this is stored in /home/[USER]/.local/share/flatpak/db/devices. It's managed by a daemon called xdg-permission-store, and the permission prompt is done by xdg-desktop-portal.

If you install flatpak then you can use its CLI to view and modify the permissions store with `flatpak permission-list`, `flatpak permission-list devices`, `flatpak permission-set devices camera org.chromium.Chromium yes` (annoyingly firefox doesn't expose an app ID so it just appears blank and I don't know how to change its permission value)

Apparently "flatseal" is a GUI tool which can manage these permissions, but I've never used it.

Honestly I tend to just delete the file and restart xdg-permission-store (or reboot) so the prompt is shown again, since generally firefox (AKA blank string) and chromium are the only things that will be in there.

In addition, on one Pi, I am having the issue where I Grant Access to the camera but then once I reboot the pi, it asks me again each time (rather than having that settings persist from boot to boot).

Now that is weird and I don't think I've seen it before! Would be interesting if you could run the flatpak commands above to see what they say, and then my first step would probably be to delete the permission store, reboot, and see if that fixes it - I wonder if the file has gotten corrupted somehow.

Statistics: Posted by cillian64 — Tue Sep 16, 2025 3:54 pm

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