Sure, my wording isn't perfect. I don't have a watertight definition ready to go. To my mind the spirit of the thing is that (for example) if a site has an http endpoint that accepts arbitrary sql queries and blindly runs them then sending your own custom query doesn't qualify as an exploit any more than scraping publicly accessible pages does. Whereas if you have to cleverly craft an sql query in a way that exploits string escapes in order to work around the restrictions that the backend has in place then that's technically an exploit (although it's an incredibly minor one against a piece of software whose developer has put on a display of utter incompetence).

The point isn't my precise wording but the underlying concept that making use of freely provided information isn't exploiting anything even if both the user and the developer are unhappy about the end result. Security boundaries are not defined by regret.