Comment 29 for bug 321287

Unfortunately, if ~/.gnupg is owned by root, Seahorse will not be able to chown it back:

cerdea@xango2:~$ ls -l test
total 0
cerdea@xango2:~$ chmod 700 test
cerdea@xango2:~$ sudo chown root:root test
[sudo] password for cerdea:
cerdea@xango2:~$ ls -la test
ls: cannot open directory test: Permission denied
cerdea@xango2:~$ chown cerdea:cerdea test
chown: changing ownership of `test': Operation not permitted
cerdea@xango2:~$ ls -l | grep test
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 2010-04-30 17:51 test
cerdea@xango2:~$

In other words: in this case, the only thing any programme can do is warn you.