In the distribution of electronic documents within an organization or across the perimeter of the organization, security is an important issue as the documents may be sensitive to a larger and a smaller degree. The distribution specifically takes place between individual persons and groups of persons either within or outside the organization, and on data communication networks including both intranets and extranets. In order to improve the security communication paths are determined for each distributed document on the basis of the set of all mappings of communication relations between senders or documents providers and all potential and actual recipients of the documents, including temporal parameters. Determined communication paths are used to compute a degree of sensitivity for the document, and this degree of sensitivity is used to monitor and limit the distribution of the document in compliance with an established security scheme for the organization.