AOL, the world's largest ISP and foremost purveyor of instant messaging, has made a change to their Terms of Service to "clarify certain things and explain it a little better to our users" about their privacy rules for AOL, according to a report from eWeek.

The whole issue comes about due to some recent postings about AOL's Terms of Service that stated that the user waives all rights to privacy for items posted in the AOL services, which appeared to include the AIM system (which is the basis for Apple's iChat).

Although the upcoming Tiger release from Apple will make iChat compatible with any IM system that works with the Jabber protocol, existing users (and most future users) of the system use AOL's AIM instant messaging network to communicate.

Apple has made no official comment on the move, but the changes appear to restore a semblance of reasonable expectation to the IM world.