The disclosed embodiments provide for checking documents for security compliance when the documents are printed, scanned, or copied. A security status is determined based on security indicators within a document's content. Security indicators can be located within a document's text, figures, watermarks, security marks, and invisible marks. Security indicators can be found by comparing a document's content to a set of stored indicator descriptions. The indicators found are used to determine a document score and security responses are triggered based on the document score.

An image reading apparatus includes a scanner to read a document, a memory to store an address and a job condition of the document read by the scanner, and circuitry to identify a user, send the document read by the scanner to the address under the job condition, determine whether a type of the document read by the scanner is a confidential document, search a number of times the confidential document has been sent to the address in the memory when the type of the document is determined as the confidential document, and display, on a screen, a message whether to send the document read by the scanner to the address under the job condition when the number of the times is less than a predetermined times.