I’ve understood the “eye” in OmekaS to set things to public/private, in order to control what is visible in the frontend. And I understood this as a popular/common feature for a web-publishing system 
As expected, the “internal” backend (eg logged in admins, editors, curators, etc) shows all private fields, BUT: it seems that values of private fields do not appear in the “internal” search. 
Seems I’m not the first one to be confused by this:
The suggested “Hide Properties” module seems like an unnecessary additional overhead which complicates things…
How is everyone else handling this?
Grateful for input and suggestions