So no, they can't be given/traded/dropped/sold/misplaced/stolen to result in people having access to the channels who aren't supposed to.While the functionality of buying attunement to an ESP channel hasn't changed, the shop item appearance/lore has been reverted to the original concept of ESP tuning crystals. Instead of receiving the crystal as an item, the buyer simply touches the shop's crystal to receive the attunement.
Anyway, this update was just to return to the original lore concept of tuning crystals. Plus it felt weird having ESP channel attunement NPCs just hanging out fulltime in some of these locations that sold channel attunements.