Nowadays most Joomla components give access to ACL (access control list, basically usage permissions for each user groups) in their backend settings. But some very good ones don’t. This happens for components which have their own interface that completely bypasses Joomla’s. Example: the excellent ProFiles file manager by Mooj.

In the _assets table look for the line with your component name (in our case com_profiles). The rules should contain an empty array {}. If it’s not empty, it probably means that there is a permissions tab somewhere and you have missed it. Go back and look for it. Don’t mess with the database any further. If however the rules are just {}, insert instead something like:

{"core.admin":{"xx":1},"core.manage":{"xx":1}}

Where xx is the id of the user group you wish to enable access for. You get that id from the _usergroups table.