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3.7.4 Schemas and Privileges

By default, users cannot access any objects in schemas they do not own. To allow that, the owner of the schema needs to grant the USAGE privilege on the schema. To allow users to make use of the objects in the schema, additional privileges may need to be granted, as appropriate for the object.

A user can also be allowed to create objects in someone else's schema. To allow that, the CREATE privilege on the schema needs to be granted. Note that by default, everyone has CREATE and USAGE privileges on the schema public. This allows all users that are able to connect to a given database to create objects in its public schema. If you do not want to allow that, you can revoke that privilege:

REVOKE CREATE ON SCHEMA public FROM PUBLIC;

(The first “public” is the schema, the second “public” means “every user”. In the first sense it is an identifier, in the second sense it is a key word, hence the different capitalization; recall the guidelines from section 2.1.1 Identifiers and Key Words.)