Losing privacy settings on reboot

[eN0ch]

Has anyone else experienced this ... ? [I'm on 12.6.3]

I restart my system and after login the screen explodes with a fireworks display of login items filling the screen and fighting each other for my finite human attention, all asking for privacy permissions, which might be accessibility and/or full disk access (and/or occasionally one of the others). I check sysPrefs / Security / privacy, and sure enough those panels are empty!

What I've found to be the best immediate solution is re-restart, after which it nearly always comes up with all the privacy settings as they should be. That's great but I'd rather have it just umm ... restarting. Apart from anything else I was kinda' hoping to setup a nightly automated restart ...

Is this behaviour familiar to anyone? Can anyone offer clues on cause and/or solutions? Thanks.

 

[bogdanw]

Most likely, corrupted TCC databases.
(TCC = transparency, consent, and control)
You could try to reset them from Terminal with

tccutil reset All

 

[eN0ch]

OK ... That's a new one on this noob (which is not surprising). Would you mind helping me further with that one? I ran it and it came back with

tccutil: executable_is_endpoint_security_client failed for path file:///Applications/this-application with error: cannot find code object on disk

So I deleted the app in question, then ran the command again. This time it gave the same message about the same app on my clone / backup drive. So I deleted it there too.

Re-ran the command again. This time it returned with

tccutil: executable_is_endpoint_security_client failed for path file:///Library/Application%20Support/com.nulana.rxagentmac/ACPCAgentService with error: cannot find code object on disk

I recognised that as an app I used to have but uninstalled it maybe a year ago. I can't find a file path anywhere that matches the one identified in that message. A Spotlight search did manage to find one folder named "com.nulana.remotixmacwild" buried in ~/Library somewhere. So deleted that.

After all that, running the command just repeatedly returns the same message as the second one above.

 

[bogdanw]

Is your Mac part of a corporate network, managed with some software? If the answer is yes, you should ask the admin to help you.
If not, you might have previously installed an app with a system extension that blocks the use of tccutil.
You can check for installed system extensions with

systemextensionsctl list

of just reset all with

systemextensionsctl reset

 

[eN0ch]

OK. Tried that. And then on login (after reenabling SIP) I had the same behaviour again, but worse. Took several restarts not just one to 'fix'. Proving elusive, eh?

 

[bogdanw]

After you reset them, they are supposed to ask for permission again. Is that setting not saved? Are you being asked again for the same app after granting/denying the permission?

If the problem persists, a solution from another thread (I can’t find it right now) was to delete ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db from Recovery.

 

[eN0ch]

Wow, yet more of this geekery . Well that was successful. Or to be more precise, I managed to delete that file in Terminal in recovery. (But it turned out to be /Library/, not ~/Library/.) And since then the mac has been very well behaved at login with no disk permissions issues. So... now to wait and see ...

 

[eN0ch]

Might be a good time to update. Since deleting TCC.db, it's like I have a new computer! Back to the stability and performance one should expect. Not completely free of some of the earlier issues yet, but hoping that will change after a reinstall. (I'm away from home another week, so can't attend to that just yet). Now to study up on TCC for further denoobing 😉