Automatically Granting Camera and Location Services Permissions for Multiple Users in macOS

Starting with macOS 10.14 (Mojave), camera and location services permissions need to be manually approved for each user. This can be quite the time-waster for computers with a large number of users; but there's no need to worry, as we've come up with a solution that requires much less involvement than going through users one by one!

The solution we've come up with checks if camera and location permissions have been approved by any user: if they haven't been, they will automatically be granted. This not only saves you the time and effort of going through every single one of your device's user accounts, but it also ensures that even if a bad actor decides to use your computer's guest account, you will still receive their pretty picture in your report! To activate this solution, just follow this step-by-step:

Install Prey on your device

If you haven't done so yet, the first step is to download and install the Prey client from our downloads page. Once that's done, permissions will be created and you will be prompted to approve them manually. Feel free to skip this step, as permissions will be automatically granted once you finish this process.

Activate Full Disk Access permissions for the prey-user binary

From the macOS  System Preferences app, select Security & Privacy.

Choose the Privacy tab, and select Full Disk Access.

To make any changes in this window, you will need to enter your administrator password. To do so, just click on the icon and enter your administrator password. This will unlock the padlock, and you'll be able to make all the required changes.

You should there see the " prey-user" binary. Click on the checkbox, as per the image below...

...and you're done!

If you don't see the prey-user binary, click the button, hit the cmd+shift+G keys and enter the following path:

/usr/local/lib/prey/current/bin/

This will take you to the folder containing the binary. Just click on prey-user and click Open. That will add the binary to your permissions list.

Once approved, prey-user will check every hour if Prey has system-wide Camera and Location Services permissions. If the permissions have not been created and/or granted, they will automatically be approved, no input nor prompt required!