President Barack Obama, pushing the reset button on his relationship with the business world, dispatched Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and other top lieutenants to Silicon Valley on Friday to promote job-creating initiatives and new cybersecurity policies to protect e-commerce and other online activities.

On the heels of the appointment of JPMorgan Chase executive William Daley as the president’s new chief of staff, Locke presided over a summit to encourage entrepreneurship among Asian-Americans and a forum highlighting a partnership between the administration and tech companies to strengthen cybersecurity.

“The announcement of Bill Daley as the new chief of staff demonstrates the president’s commitment to helping businesses succeed,” he said in an interview between events at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus and Stanford University. “The president understands and has said this many times: The government doesn’t create jobs, the private sector does.”

Locke, along with White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt, announced a new federal office to foster development of better online identity protection that some day could replace the name-and-password process used by all Internet users. The office, to be housed in the Department of Commerce, will act as a conduit between the private sector and government to promote the administration’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.

“The emphasis that the administration has on cybersecurity, on privacy, on trusted use of the Internet will actually be great opportunities for companies here in Silicon Valley,” he said. “Everything we are trying to do requires the active involvement and participation of the private sector and certainly the technology firms.”

Even as e-commerce increases — more than $30 billion in sales occurred online in the United States this holiday season alone — a growing concern among users about the risks of doing business and other activities over the Internet could eventually slow its success, Locke said.

“The threats on the Internet seem to be proliferating just as fast as the opportunities,” Locke told an audience at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “Data breaches, malware, ID theft and spam are just some of the most commonly known invasions of a user’s privacy and security. People are worried about their personal information going out, and parents like me are worried about unwanted explicit material coming in to their children.”

The administration issued a draft of its strategy last summer, triggering some concerns among civil liberty groups that the government will eventually develop a national identity card. Locke and Schmidt, a former security executive for eBay and Microsoft, said no such national ID card will be developed. While some sort of encrypted identity card or USB device might replace online passwords, they will be created by the private sector, will be voluntary and will come in many different forms created by different companies, they said.

“We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke told the Stanford gathering. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords through the creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

Said Schmidt, “We need the private sector to lead on this.”

A few security industry experts invited to speak on a panel at the Stanford event gave the administration’s efforts thumbs up so far.

Dave DeWalt, CEO of McAfee, said it was “about time” the government began to push online security initiatives. The number of online threats has escalated to a “pandemic,” he said. “Every day at the McAfee lab, we get 55,000 pieces of malware. About 90 percent of those pieces of malware are designed for one thing — to steal.”

Phil Bond, CEO of TechAmerica, an industry lobbying group, said the administration’s “nuanced” approach “is a pretty rare thing from government. The temptation is to go for the mandates.”

The new technology, though, will require updated laws to ensure that data stored on these devices, and information about what kind of online activity it is used for, is protected, said James Dempsey, vice president of public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“We believe it can be done in a way that provides assurances customers need as well as the flexibility industry needs,” he said. “We don’t want a single provider, whether it’s government or nongovernment, that has such a broad view of our online actions and transactions.”

Contact John Boudreau at 408-278-3496.