So it is recognized as a mass storage device but appears to be an error. My first thoughts were to reformat the card using the cameras built in formatting function. I assume it does and that you do not need any pictures saved on the card.

After doing some more reading, I seem to have resolved the issue, for now, by these steps:
1. unplugged the camera
2. sudo thunar, navigated to /mnt/, which contained folder with the name of the device (even though it is unplugged, not sure why)
3. changed permissions for that folder for each user to be able to read/write
so now any user can mount it, it seems, and it does not ask for a password

i am still not sure if that is the way to fix it - this seems to fix it for that particular device only
hopefully they don't buy a new camera ...

I have a new Olympus TG 5 camera, but when I mounted via USB cord or installing the SD card into my laptop I can see the device (camera or SD card) but I cannot access the files.* I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 I did some research and discovered that the Ubuntu Software center has a free utility to create, check, label and dump exFAT files so I installed it and now I can see the DCIM folder and access the images on the SD card.* The file I installed from the Ubuntu Software center is called "exfat-utils".

As an aside, I should point out that Ubuntu 14.04 will no longer be supported as of next month. You should look urgently into upgrading to a version of Ubuntu that will continue to receive support after that point.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases