Washington Post via MSN – Hundreds of Americans have been arrested after being connected to a crime by facial recognition software, a Washington Post investigation has found, but many never know it because police seldom disclose their use of the controversial technology. Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software — denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error, especially when identifying people of color. In fact, the records show that officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports, saying that they identified suspects “through investigative means” or that a human source such as a witness or police officer made the initial identification. In Evansville, Ind., for example, police said they identified a man who beat up a stranger on the street from his tattooed arms, long hair and previous jail booking photos. And in Pflugerville, Tex., police said they learned the name of a man who helped steal $12,500 in merchandise from Ulta Beauty “by utilization of investigative databases.” Both of these suspects were identified with the aid of facial recognition, according to internal police records — information that was never shared with the accused, according to them or their attorneys. A spokeswoman for Pflugerville declined to answer questions about this case. Evansville police did not respond to requests for comment…