Comment 5 for bug 1349813

Supposedly this needs the "org.freedesktop.accounts.change-own-user-data" privilege from /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.accounts.policy . The problem with calling this in phablet-shell is that this isn't a local active session:

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ pkcheck --action-id org.freedesktop.accounts.change-own-user-data --process $$
Not authorized.

So you need to run this as part of an autopilot test which will be run in the actual unity session, not a remote ssh session.

For testing this quickly, you can of course also change this temporarily (set <allow_any>yes</allow_any> in the .policy file above)