If I had children who may want to phone their friends using Skype I would want to disable the SkypeMe feature when I wasn't around to monitor.

Is this an important issue?

If something badly wrong takes place, without a parental control button the media, and certainly the parents, may try to lay some of the blame on Skype.

If you have kids you should lock your workstation when your away from it or setup a seperate user for them. Same goes for the workplace ,

ALWAYS LOCK YOUR WORKSTATION WHEN YOUR AWAY FROM IT.

Its nothing to do with skype.
Padlock your home phone.

Not a solution I am afraid. Yes, they would have their own area on the computer but I want them to be able to talk to their friends.

And I am afraid you have missed my point entirely. If you read my message carefully you will see that I am thinking of the protection of the Skype owners who may be accused of making things easy, rather than the care of the kids.

Not that I have anything against kids (as long as they are far away from me) :-) But that can easily be another issue for someone else to raise.

Well I didn't really miss your point , your point is you want control of when you kids can use it, Thats down to parenting. If you don't want them using the computer unsupervised then don't let them use the computer unsupervised, If you don't want them using Skype then Limit their user and disable access for the application.

Skype is just a tool, You are responsible for dictating when your children can use this tool. It would be like blaming the manufacturer of a hammer for your children smashing up your car.

Oh yeh , and you can set your privacy settings to disallow incoming calls.

May I repeat?

If you read my message carefully you will see that I am thinking of the protection of the Skype owners who may be accused of making things easy, rather than the care of the kids.

Let me show what I mean...

A kid gets raped or killed. The parents are looking for a way out so blame Skype. At present, Skype can't put the ball back into their court by saying "You should have used the Parental Control password."

I do understand what you were getting at but, as I mentioned before, this is a separate issue and needs to be taken up by people who worry about their kids. I don't have any so I don't worry about them.

I am just concerned that Skype may get bad publicity because people who have misfortunates tend to lash out at anything and anyone they can - not that this is not understandable amongst humans :-)

If you can't see what I am trying to get at, then I am sorry, can we leave this now and beg to differ?

I understand what you mean. Sure this could be implemented. But for most people of course unnecessary. But if it wasn´t on by default, it would be a nice feature. But of course the most important thing is to teach children how to act on the internet and so on.